


Fellow Associates.

by smolhombre



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Young Avengers (Comics)
Genre: Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, F/M, Flawed characters, Friendship, Getting Together, Hero Let Down, Hero Worship, Long, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Teamwork, Write the Young Avengers Netflix Series You Want to See in the World, internet culture, plot heavy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-08
Updated: 2017-08-22
Packaged: 2018-12-12 17:08:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 33,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11741475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smolhombre/pseuds/smolhombre
Summary: The Young Avengers, assemble. (Eventually.)





	1. 01.

_**01.** _

There’s nothing, is the thing. There’s nothing, but there’s so  _ much  _ nothing that it’s clearly hiding something. 

Some spies they were.

Kate tells herself what she has to as she blinks away dry red dirt flying in from the open windows of her rental car, a seafoam green Kia that smells like old french fries as if to spite the little pine tree dangling from its rearview. She’s spent too long digging for a fifty-mile radius of her answer to be wrong, and when the off-white two story crests her view she thinks maybe a sob could claw, corporeal, out of her chest of its own accord. 

It’s vacant, of course. She figured as much before even booking her plane ticket, and can tell it’s been vacant for some time before the little SUV is even in park, parallel to the wide steps leading up to the porch that wraps around the right side of the house. There’s no sound of the wood panels of the porch settling, even when she holds her breath to listen, no breeze through the curtains sandwiched in green shutters. But it’s there, and it’s enough. 

She’s got a six inch knife strapped to her belt. Her hand hovers over the taser she’d wedged between the driver’s seat and the center console, the mace attached to the handle of her handbag. Too clunky, too much effort. Even if no one is here, she’s gotta be fast. It’s not like anyone would get close enough for her to use either of them, anyway.

Kate had wrapped a gauzy purple scarf, filched from her step-mother’s closet, around the lower half of her face while in her window seat halfway through her coach flight out to Iowa. A kelly green hoodie, massive and shapeless, is shoved in the bottom of her well-loved Tory Burch to replace it when she ditches the thing in a gas station toilet somewhere before catching her first-class red eye back to New York in a few hours. It’s annoying but necessary, so she adjusts it before stepping out of the car and tries to ignore the beginning swelter of summer heat it traps close to her skin — there were cameras everywhere in the airport, then the rental car company office. Likely in the streetlights erratically lining the pot-hole ridden road out here. SHIELD had fallen, she didn’t have to be anything but a semi-regular  _ Buzzfeed _ reader to know that. But she valued her life too much to count on them being  _ gone _ . 

The door is unlocked when her too-warm palm turns the knob, wrapped in the hem of her shirt. The wood underneath her boots doesn’t creak at all, even to be swallowed by the thick, stale air inside. Still, it smells of dust and abandon, and it’s comforting, at least, that they staged one thing right.

She steps over a half-dressed Barbie, hair all in stiff, plasticy disarray and her blonde strands half colored in with an orange marker. There’s a Hot Wheels graveyard where the dining area to her left meets the kitchen, oddly bright even with the blinds shut. The white tile floors are slick, when she gets to them, where they should be dull and sticky. 

Strike one.

She opens the fridge, feeling around for hidden drawers. Nothing. Under the sink is sticky from spilled dish soap and oven cleaner, but Kate doesn’t risk turning the tap on to rinse her hands clean. She feels a stab of guilt wiping them off on the decorative hand towel hanging off the oven’s handle before reminding herself it doesn’t matter. She keeps the towel; she’ll have to ditch that later, too. 

After cleaning her hands as best as she’s able, she starts drumming her fingers on the wall, tapping her knuckles where beams should be, her ear close to hear any echoes. It’s all reinforced. Kate estimates something like at least four inches of steel behind the wallpaper and a likely sweet-ass panic room underneath her feet that keeps everything preternaturally quiet as she makes a round of the living room, the little linen closet underneath the stairs. There’s a wad of cash stuck between the folds of a scratchy green towel. Kate rubs each Benjamin between her fingers for the tell of a tracker’s bump or ridge before pocketing it. That’s strike two.

Humming, Kate circles back to their soft, abused sofa that sat higher on the left than the right. Two more stacks, one underneath a cushion, one in a seam hidden in the back. Another in the pantry, crawling with ants and putrid smelling. Her sweaty hand presses the scarf close to her nose as she shuts the pantry door, wrinkled in distaste. Her step mom wears the same Quelques Fleurs Royale perfume Susan did. It bothered her before, but nothing like now. Overtop the smell of old sugar and stale bread and the barely there crinkle of ants marching over plastic, Kate’s stomach threatens revolt.

Three more left, she guesses; they wouldn’t risk more than that.

Her phone dings softly in her pocket. She’s on the clock, now, so she swallows bile and sentiment and ascends the stairs, mindful of touching the banisters.

Two rooms at the crest of the stairs are open — children’s rooms, all mess and bright color and broken crayons and even a one-armed teddy bear trailing to the closed door opposite. Kate presses herself as close to the door as possible without touching it fully, gives a microscopic turn of the handle with her towel-clad hand. The tumblers make no stuttering noises, no quiet, thumping stops, so she presses flat to the wall and throws it open, yanking her arm back quickly.

Nothing. Good. 

She peeks in. The bed is unmade, rumpled blue sheets and a white down comforter that looks soft enough she half wants to run her hand over it. Kate only checks the bedside tables perfunctorily, not expecting anything and not disappointed. The en suite bathroom is clean, too. She, apparently, wore an apple perfume Kate thought Bath and Body Works discontinued in the nineties — she’s tempted to snatch it just because it’s funny. Someone would buy it on eBay, anyway. There’s no cologne or men’s toiletries in the cabinet; if Kate didn’t know better than to say it was amateur, she’d think it was a message in and of itself.

Kate stands with her hands on her hips, studying the bed before grabbing the mattress and throwing it off its frame. A lamp clatters to the floor and she tenses, ready to see if anything or anyone meets her test. She bites back a groan when nothing does. 

Three indents are neat in the middle of the bed’s underside. 

_ Fuck _ .

She taps her toe once, twice, three times, thinking. 

Kate grabs the picture on the nightstand not toppled under the mattress. It doesn’t matter, anymore. She snatches the pictures lining the hall, heedless of how the frames shatter in her wake, yanks an ultrasound from the fridge and marches them to her car, folded in half and shoved unceremoniously into her purse. 

An undignified grumble rattles out of her as she straightens, hands on her hips and brow heavy. After a moment she pulls out the knife and heads toward the shed behind the house. She hates last minute changes to her plans. 

* * *

It’s seventy-two hours after landing back in the city before Kate finally checks out of her second hotel and takes the long way back to her apartment. Anyone who tails her after that deserves the ass kicking.

“Katie!” Samuel greets her cheerfully, sprawled across their leather couch. His nose ring glints in the light from the big window across from him, and his ashy hair sheens in the light, the top half of it clipped away from his face with one of her barrettes. “How was South Beach? You don’t look like you got any sun at all!”

She collapses on his spindly, hairy legs, peeking out from a pair of shorts so indecent he’d be arrested for so much as stepping out to get coffee in the shop around the corner from their building. Some of the residual tension knotted in her shoulders and back starts to loosen as she looks around her apartment, still standing. Samuel, still alive; breathing and warm where they touch. Herself, still alive to check. Her head lolls back against the couch as she beams at him.

“You know as well as I do UVA rays are the mortal enemies of ladies like us.”

“The hell you say,” Samuel drawls, English accent thick in the spaces between his teeth. “You don’t need to worry about wrinkles or anything else, Miss Independently Wealthy.  _ I _ have sugar daddies to maintain.”

Kate rolls her eyes, pushing herself up and sauntering to the kitchen the next room over. She lights the wax melter in their entertainment center on the way — still with the melt she had in before she left. Samuel hadn’t even bothered to turn it on once while she was gone, and Kate can tell. It smells like dirty socks, ball-sack, and earl grey no matter how shallowly she tries to breathe. 

Sometimes, she hates having a roommate. 

“The only ‘sugar daddy’ you have ever had to worry about is not pissing your own damn  _ father _ off to the point he cuts you off and drags you back to Hastings.”

“I’d never let him take me past Brighton as you should well know. And your drawl gets worse when you spend time with your family, Sweet Home Alabama. Did you know that?”

“I’m from Virginia!” She calls over her shoulder, rummaging around their cabinets for something edible. It also, for the record, does  _ not _ do that, especially considering she spent the last few days by herself in the city not a full hour away from her apartment and not with her family at all.  

“How do you explain how I constantly find myself in lewd relations with older, wealthier men, then?” Samuel asks as she’s abandoning all hope of a sandwich, propping his head on her shoulder and wrapping his arms around her middle. He, also, smells a bit like socks, ball-sack, and earl grey.

“I believe that’s called ‘stereotypical bored twink syndrome.’ Where’s the peanut butter?”

“I deeply resent and resemble that homophobic slander against my good name,” he sniffs. “Moreover, you utter ass, you know I don’t eat that shit.”

“I must have forgotten to buy some more before I left,” she groans. “Dammit.”

“That is my gay revenge.”

“Does your gay revenge include you not bathing the entire time I was gone? Do you just give up on hygiene when you have the house to yourself?”

“I have seen you change your tampon in the middle of this very kitchen, are we gonna go here —”

“I was drunk and you promised never to mention it.” She reaches around to grab his nipple through his thin, loose sleepshirt and twist it. “It also does not solve my  _ dire sandwich concern _ .” 

“Uncle! Uncle!” Sam squeals, trying to arch out of her grip. “I’ll ring for curry!”

She releases him with a saccharine grin. “That’d be great, thanks.”

Kate listens for his footsteps to fade into the plush carpet in his room before turning on her heel and grabbing the tote bag from where she dropped it by the couch, marching it to her bedroom. She’d ditched the hoodie before making it to her first hotel back in the city, and it’s much lighter slung over her shoulder than a bag that size has any right to be. Kate had removed all her personal effects beforehand, of course; had replaced them with her favorite fake IDs and even — a source of glowing personal pride — fake grocery store loyalty cards. 

She splits the stacks of cash up between her three safes, the photographs divided between the stacks and sandwiched between the bills. Kate will make copies when Samuel’s at class tomorrow and she can drag the rest of her shit out to put them in order before she starts Step Two. 

Her feet ache when she pulls her shoes off, perched on the foot of her bed, and the burn on her forearm smarts when her blouse grazes it as she tugs it over her head, but she’s done. She did it.

“K _ aaaaaaa _ te,” Samuel sing-songs from out front, and she grins fondly though he can’t see it. Nothing went wrong at all, she was back in time for takeout and Samuel is none the wiser. She did that, and by herself. 

“One sec!”

Kate pulls on her favorite blue silk pajamas before joining him in the living room. It’s the little things, she thinks, tucking her cold toes underneath Samuel’s thigh. The cool glide of silk on her skin, the jasmine scent still lingering underneath the fabric from the sugar scrub she’d used at the last hotel. The stacks of money hidden from a job well-done. 

“So tell me what I missed when I was gone,” she asks, pulling her hair into a messy knot atop her head. “I was so plugged out I didn’t even have time for the news.”

“The news,” Samuel snorts. “Only you. No nukes were launched, I’m happy to report. But — hey, you know how your dad bought the  _ Bulletin _ a few weeks ago?”

“Yes, I’m aware,” she drawls, bone-dry. It’s all she heard about for weeks before the acquisition was finalized during their mandatory weekly phone calls, as Samuel well knew.

“Well, they finally produced some decent journalism not relating to super-weirdos crawling over Hell’s Kitchen. They did a piece on Danny Rand while you were gone —”

She straightens, frowning.

“I’m sorry,  _ who _ ?”

Samuel smiles triumphantly. “I thought the same. Do you remember Deiondra from school?”

“Sure, we picked out cotillion dresses together.”

“Well, her old roommate Heather is Joy Meachum’s cousin —”

“Bull _ shit _ !”

“Yes! I remember she came to guest lecture in Business Ethics that one time, right? Right when her brother took over Rand — because Danny was supposed to be dead, yeah? Actual dead, so they got the big prize. But, anyway, I got Heather’s number — let’s be real, here, of course I did. I could one up the goddamned Black Widow — and asked and it’s true, Joy told her personally.”

“And what? What did the  _ Bulletin _ possibly have to say to explain how he’s —”

“The not-so-deceased! He came  _ back _ , a full grown billionaire —”

“From the goddamned  _ dead _ , Sammy?”

“Unfortunately still too young for my refined palate.”

“I cannot believe you didn’t call me when you heard Danny Rand brought necromancy to New York.”

“Oh, he says he was saved by nuns or monks or whatever. Nothing as juicy as necromancy. But no one can explain how he could have survived to be found in the first place. The  _ Bulletin _ had the same question.”

“Monks, huh? That’s convenient,” she murmurs. 

The doorbell rings. Kate reaches over to grab a few bills from their petty cash drawer in the end table and passes them to Samuel with numb fingers. Danny Rand. Danny Rand. Danny Rand. Kate stares a hole through their high ceiling trying to arrange his piece of the puzzle with the others, re-aligning corners and swooped edges and the voids where pieces should be, again and again till a headache pinches between her eyebrows. 

“Aren’t you gonna eat?” Samuel calls from their kitchen after paying. “I won’t save you any, you know I won’t!”

Her head is spinning too fast to join him where he’s divvying up their cartons of food. She doesn’t answer. 

Back from the dead. She’s heard of that one before. But never someone she’s had an actual shot to touch.

“I took all the lamb korma,” Samuel announces smugly when he curls back on the couch. She snaps back in her body.  _ Get it together, Bishop. _

“We already knew you were a bastard,” Kate snips before reaching over to grab a cube of lamb between two fingers.

She frowns after licking the sauce clean from them. Chipped, dry, and mangled. How had she overlooked that on her way back? She had to be more careful, to be better. She’d get a manicure tomorrow to fix it. 

And anyway, last she checked she and Joy went to the same salon. She pops open the Diet Coke Samuel slides her way, accepts the fork he offers and digs into the carton balanced on the cushion between them. 

No rest for the weary.

* * *

“New York is a big city but I swear it fits in the palm of your hand,” Kate smiles as Cassandra paints her nails. She was the only one here who kept them short enough — Kate would follow her anywhere. And if she can trust the woman to manage her cuticles painlessly, she trusts her for some gossip.

“All my girlfriends from boarding school go here,” she continues, chuckling. Kate spins her little flute of champagne on the marble tabletop in front of her with her dry hand and admires the oyster pink Cassandra had helped her pick out shift in the warm light overhead. “I know their CVs say they live in London or Toronto or wherever, yet all I do is see them here everytime I come to see you.”

“Cheshire is a good reference service, that’s for sure,” Cassandra says lightly, rolling the varnish bottle between her palms. Her golden, curly hair smells of honey and lavender as she ducks back down to coat Kate’s ring finger again. Kate takes a sip of her drink and as the bubbles fizz out on her tongue has to fight the urge to wipe the smudged imprint of her lips from the rim of the glass. Diptyque “Choisya” is sweet and just a little bitter in the air from the candles lit around the room, and the familiar smell of it steadies her as she takes a big breath in.  _ Homefield advantage _ , she reminds herself. 

“I’m just going to redirect the wedding invitations here, then, and people can pick them up as they come in. Save on postage.”

“Wedding?” Cassandra perks up, squeezing the hand in her grip while a huge smile blooms to life on her wide, heart shaped face. Her hands are so soft around Kate it is almost uncomfortable.

“Not mine, not mine,” Kate winces, trying to hide it behind another sip. “My dad is...renewing his vows. Again.”

Cassandra deflates a little, but Kate is too close to let her rhythm falter now. However Cassandra feels about her dad’s repeated over the top wedding practices is nothing to how she, herself, actually feels about it. It is also all a lie.

“Maybe I’ll just come in — what is it? Tuesday afternoon for Iris, Friday morning for Miranda Lowe.”

“Miranda just changed hers to Saturday morning, I’ll have you know. And the Jackson twins split their appointments up now. Ruth comes Monday, Maggie comes in Wednesday. Don’t get those mixed up, when you come — you know how they are.”

Kate laughs only partly because she needs to keep Cassandra rolling; no small part of it is just because those women were the most narcissistic assholes the whole of Manhattan had to offer, a feat in and of itself.

“What about Joy, though? I’d hate for her to be the only one who had to receive hers by mail like a plebeian.”

“Joy? Joy Meachum, you mean?” Cassandra stops short, and Kate’s stomach drops in preemptive disappointment.

“Oh, does she not come here anymore?”

“No, she does. Second Thursday of the month. I just didn’t know you two knew each other. Surely you didn’t go to school together, too?” Cassandra looks around furtively before leaning forward, her voice whisper soft and silky. Her lipstick is a pretty, pale lilac color, and it sheens in the light. “She’s...a bit  _ older _ than you, isn’t she?”

There’s a response ready on Kate’s tongue, and it’s not even really a lie — but Cassandra answers her own question, like the gem she is, looking up in sudden (and surely mistaken) revelation. 

“Oh, I can’t keep up with all the boards and committees you people are on. You did that Dress for Success dinner a few months ago, didn’t you?”

She absolutely didn’t. She smiles in answer as Cassandra brings her hand close to her bespectacled gaze for a final check. Satisfied, she screws the lid to the top coat back on, and Kate wiggles her eyebrows as she brings her hands up to her face and blows on her fingers.

“It’s a small world like that, isn’t it?”

* * *

Tommy Shepherd lives forty five minutes in the opposite direction of her apartment, and an hour and fifteen minutes from the salon. It’s a nice walk, most days. A decent jog, every once in awhile — she rewards herself on those days. Tommy likes that, too, but Kate doesn’t like thinking about it — but it’s been a long weekend. She calls a car in the salon lobby and in its plush, impersonal back seat reads through Thursday’s edition of the  _ Bulletin _ for the hundredth time, making more notes in the little moleskin she carries around in her bag. The most important notes have already been made, of course, and filed with the others. But she isn’t lazy; she double checks her work.

Danny Rand is alive. She believes that. She’ll speak to him soon enough. For now, though, she’s done what she can, short of being patient. Kate tells the driver to stop a block and a half from Tommy’s building and hums to herself as she walks up his steps, as she knocks on his door.

_ Just for now _ , she thinks,  _ this is just for me. I deserve it _ .

“Honey,” she croons to the opening door, a collage of chipped paint, “I’m home.”

Tommy’s hair is backlit to a glowing, beautiful silver halo in his doorway. Before she can think about it, she pushes the soft flop of his long bangs off his forehead, half tucking the longest pieces that can reach behind his ear.  She pries the joint from between his smiling lips and brings it to her own while he is distracted under the touch.

“Smoking in broad daylight in the middle of my hall, Miss Bishop? Now, what would the papers have to say about that?”

“It’s been so long since they’ve let me on  _ Page Six _ , you’d really have to ask their editorial staff.”

Tommy grabs the joint, his dry, rough knuckles a slow drag brushing against her mouth she feels buzzing there even when he pulls away, and jerks his chin to gesture her into the apartment fully.

“Nice heels. Can’t jog in them, though,” he says flippantly, as much weight to the words as the smoke curling out from his tongue.

“I had a long weekend, cut me some slack,” she shoots back, flopping on the couch and kicking the shoes in question off. To be fair, they weren’t actually heels. She could run in them if she had to. Could run (and  _ has run _ ) in several of the actual heels in her closet. But Tommy thinks every shoe not a rubber flip flop was a Louboutin stiletto, and Kate has neither the time or inclination to educate him differently.

“I’m glad to see you, Princess. It’s been long enough I thought maybe my charm had finally worn off.”

“Glad to see me,” she snorts. “Right. Are you tight on money?” 

For a moment, her grin falters as she considers her own words. He rolls his eyes and rests his arms on the back of the couch behind her.

“Would you believe you aren’t the only person in New York City who wants to buy weed?”

“I’d give you money if you needed it, Tommy. Even without the other.”

Tommy leans forward, reaching out like he’s going to cup her cheek — before giving it a little slap.

“Princess, come on, you’re killing the mood, here.”

Alright, then.

“You want the usual? Or...if your weekend’s been that bad, I can get you the Manager’s Special.” His eyebrows wiggle suggestively.

“You are lame as fuck, Tommy Shepherd,” she groans. “When have I ever taken you up on the  _ Manager’s Special _ ?”

“Well there was that time you _begged —_ ” 

“‘Begged’ my ass, Shepherd. Don’t start with me, I told you I’m tired and cranky.”

“— you  _ pleaded,  _ after we got into that tequila you brought back from Punta Cana. But like I told you then,” he flicks at her nose before walking to the kitchen. “I’m a gentleman. And I always make a lady dinner, first. I’ll even let you pick the kind of pizza rolls.”

“Why, Tommy, that’s almost as nice as the man who offered me a yacht for a ‘single night of pleasure in his arms.’”

Tommy pokes his head out of the doorway, face screwed up distastefully. His shirt is massive on him, the swoop of his collarbone collecting dingy, yellow light where it peeks out from the collar.

“Are all rich people so weird?”

Kate only shrugs, examining her nails and biting the inside of her cheek to keep from grinning.

“Capitalism is a disease, Miss Bishop.”

“So stop charging me for weed.”

“You know, it is  _ so _ like the one percent to try and rob the little man —”

“Tommy,” she sighs. “Please shut the fuck up.”

He all but falls back on the couch, long limbs surprisingly heavy where they land half on top of her own. The plate is still warm from the microwave when he balances it on her knee. 

“I thought you said I could pick the kind of pizza rolls.”

Tommy clears his throat before leaning over the coffee table, rummaging around the utter mess there no little bit theatrically. “That was when I thought I had more than one bag. My bad.”

He leans back up, waving a lighter with Captain America’s shield emblazoned on it. “Go ahead and find something on Netflix — so help me god, if you try to play  _ Downton Abbey  _ in my domicile again you’ll be out a dealer — and I’ll roll us one.”

The pizza rolls scald the roof of her mouth to rubbery weirdness, but she keeps at them methodically as she scrolls through the options on Tommy’s (likely stolen) television. It’s only five minutes before he rests his head on her shoulder, smelling like weed, yes, and something crisp like mint, and they pass the blunt between each other while the pastel colors  _ Sailor Moon  _ light up his living room, filter weak pinks and teal to the light strands of his hair.

She sometimes stretches her high longer than it naturally extends to excuse herself playing with it, eyes kept droopy, joints held loose, a sleepy smile heavy on her face. He hums appreciatively whenever she touches it, no matter how briefly, sometimes before her fingers are even really carding through it, like he can tell before she does that she wants to. It doesn’t matter, she tells herself firmly, whenever his head ends up cradled in her lap, eyelids a vulnerable flutter that look velvet soft and the right size to hold her thumb’s caress.

It doesn’t matter. And sometimes she makes herself remember that and ignores him all but pressing the crown of his head flat to her palm. But she’s earned it, today. Kate leans over to set the empty plate on the table, holds the joint loosely in the relaxed v of her index and middle finger.

“C’mere,” she murmurs. 

“You’re killing me, Bishop,” Tommy sighs, utterly nonsensically but still crawling to lay where she guides him. Kate doesn’t want to make rhyme or reason of it, already sunken into the warm stretch of her next hit. She tosses her head back so it lolls off the back of the couch. One hand is tracing nonsense patterns onto Tommy’s scalp, the other bringing the blunt to her lips again. Fuck etiquette, Tommy could wait till she had her fill.

“It was a strange weekend, Tommy.”

“I’m not equipped to talk you through this right now.”

“Are you ever, asshole?” She shoots back without heat. “Just let me complain.”

Tommy doesn’t answer, and Kate takes three more slow drags before she speaks again, watching the lights from the TV dance in pastel, distilled relief on the ceiling. “This was probably the easy part, too, you know.”

“Mm.”

“Can I tell you the truth, Shepherd?”

“Mhm.”

“I kind of don’t want to keep on with it. I’m gonna fuck up eventually.”

“Luck’s gonna run out.”

She picks her head up, looks down at him as alert as she’s capable of.

“...Yeah, I guess.”

His eyes are shut. There are three freckles above his left brow and a bit of pizza sauce near his mouth. Kate brings the joint back up to her mouth, lest she do something stupid.

“It’s gonna be alright, Katie-Kate.” 

Kate lowers the little burning nub, places it between his lips.

“It better be, Shepherd.”

One of Tommy’s eyes slits open, brown and serious and more sober than Kate is comfortable with.

“Said it would be, yeah?”

Her hand fists in his hair until his eyes close again. She looks back up to the TV.

“Yeah.”


	2. 02.

_**02.** _

Billy absently picks at the rough, dry skin cracking at his knobby knuckle. The early morning sky blooms oversaturated pinks and oranges like ink on soggy paper through the smudgy bus window he leans against. His legs cramp from two and a half hours in the same position, spread around the bulk of his backpack between his knees. He knows he should be in a better mood, all things considered, and knowing that only makes him more dour. The sooner he gets out to stretch his legs and ingest as much caffeine as legally available to him, the better.

“Would you mind cutting that the fuck out, asshole?”

Billy looks up to see his front-neighbors’ angry brow and red, bleary eyes peeking over their seat.

“That goddamn tapping, jackass. Knock it out.”

Billy blinks, looking down to the iPad in his lap he’d been drawing on idly.

He should let it go.

“Hey,” he says, leaning forward. “How about you don’t waste your time or mine asking me something stupid again, pal?”

“Fucking _punk ass bitch_ —”

He groans. He _hates_ public transit, he _hates_ assholes, he hates _everything_. “I said don’t waste your time. Don’t ask me again,” he snaps.

Billy doesn’t lean back in his own seat until he hears the creak of his neighbor settling in front of him. There’s something tight in his belly like a puzzle piece snapped in its rightful place that he only realizes after the fact means he’s messed up. Again. He _thunks_ his head back against the seat. He hadn’t slipped up in a while; his nerves must be too bad to keep a lid on it — maybe he shouldn’t have risked the bus after all.

Guilt bubbles hot in his throat when his reflexive anger cedes. He hadn’t really meant to do that. Maybe they were having a bad day, worse than his. What did Billy know, really?

When the bus reaches its stop two hours later, Billy coughs twice as his neighbor collects his bags from the overhead. They look up balefully, suspicious in the way people always were after it happened, their hindbrain aware of something _off_ when they themselves couldn’t acknowledge it.

“I...hope you have a very good day today,” he mumbles, feeling every bit a fool. He doesn’t even think it works, doesn’t feel the clicking in his gut that’s supposed to follow. Maybe he didn’t mean it enough — and what’s that say about him, really?

“Goddamn freak,” the other man mutters, quick to exit the bus while looking over his shoulder as if he expected Billy to try and follow him.

Billy deflates, plodding into the muggy, gross air of the city from the stale A/C blowing in the bus with leaden feet.

He hates New York City. He hates Manhattan. He hates Hell’s Kitchen.

He hates _running_.

* * *

“I think they underplayed how close this megascreen was to my window,” he sighs idly into the phone cradled between his ear and shoulder.

“Are you sure you can stay there, Billy?”

“I mean I’ve signed the lease, mom. It is what it is. And it’s a little better in the bedroom, at least.”

“We’ll bring some of those nice, thick curtains when we come down,” she tells him firmly. He can see her, behind his eyelids, jotting a reminder to herself down on a crumpled receipt from the bottom of the bag his aunt Teri got her for her birthday last year, supple dove grey leather perpetually swimming in her psychology journals, case notes, lipglosses only half closed and dripping in glittering stickiness. He blinks again, and it doesn’t go away — he can smell the warm, green grass she’s sitting on, her legs stretched out in front of her, crossed at the ankle and dappled in sunlight filtering from between the trees overhead.

“Billy?”

He shakes himself free, his heart a hammer protesting the cage of his chest.

“Thank you,” he says, and means it. “How is Jimmy’s soccer tournament going?”

As if on queue, unintelligible cheering crackles through the background. Billy hears it on more than one frequency.

“Hot. Loud. They’re losing,” she sighs, and he grimaces in sympathy where he’s curled on his side on the bare hardwoods of his bare apartment, staring at the blank wall opposite him. He planned to move down today specifically to avoid going.

“Your dad got off easy with an open-heart today. If I didn’t know better I’d think Janelle scheduled this surgery on special request.”

He snorts. “Aren’t you glad I at least picked an indoor hobby?”

“I’m glad at least art exhibits now usually have wine.”

“You’ve been using me for grocery store Pinot and cheese cubes all this time!”

“William Kaplan, when you have kids of your own you will understand I am entitled to at least that. When are you meeting with the woman from that gallery?”

“She’s taking me to lunch tomorrow. I’ve got to decide what pieces to bring, though.”

“Well send me pictures later and I — oh, shoot. I’ve got to go. Sorry, Billy. I’ll call you later. Be careful!”

“Yeah, okay. Bye,” he says quickly, but the line is already off.

He’s had a few of his bigger pieces shipped to the apartment ahead of him, but it takes several minutes of convincing himself to go through them before he can rise from the floor. Before he’s even fully crossed the room to reach them, though, he gives it up as a bad job. His heart’s not in it, now.  

Getting out of the soccer tournament was a bonus, but now that he’s talked to his mom and is sat in his new, strange, empty apartment, Billy feels the open, drippy feeling in his chest that precedes a cry.

He has a reason to be here, but only as big as all the reasons he shouldn’t be.

An ambulance wails past below. It is what it is. He’s here, and objectively it’s where he should be. Billy believes that. He has to. Homesickness will pass for him like it does everyone else.

Billy checks the time on his phone before looking around the room critically. He’s typed the message out in some variation or another enough times he doesn’t even look down at the Twitter app open on his screen.

“Liveshow in 20! Maybe trying watercolors for once and taking a few requests lol. Come hang out!”

Replies to his tweet start lighting his phone up as soon as he posts it, but he’s too busy setting up to open any of them. He arranges his laptop close to the window where the light from the screen outside pours through, stretching his power cord to its limit. By the time he’s got his inks and brushes laid out he’s nearly late.

He has to crack all his knuckles twice and shake himself no little bit like a wet dog before he opens up his browser.

“Hey guys,” he grins into his webcam, sat cross legged on the floor in front of it and checking his hair in the little box at the corner of his screen. “Woah, this city smog is not kind to my hair. I look like a hobbit!” Notifications light up his screen as more people enter his room. “Sorry for announcing a show last minute, but I just wanted to break the new place in with good art ju-ju. Also I didn’t want to unpack, let’s be real.”

Here, he leans over to lift his laptop up and give it a little turn so they can see the bare room he’s in. “Very homey, am I right?” He winks when the webcam settles back to him.

“Anyway, I got a few requests on the Twitter while I was on the bus ride over, so I’m just going to do some speedpaints, I guess. Nothing big. Oh! Before we start, let’s give thanks to my neighbor and ‘avocado-two,’ the only wifi in this building that isn’t password protected. They have sponsored my liveshows until I get the internet folks out here myself.”

He leans forward to read some of the messages filling up the screen, ease filling his chest despite himself at the familiar names and the kind messages he still can’t really understand.

“‘PunisherDaddy’ — that’s such a horrible name, you should be ashamed of yourself. I’m surprised YouNow even allowed that when you registered. They say I should do a piece for the Good Samaritan neighbor and stick it in their mailbox. That’s probably actually the right thing to do. I’ll do that first, then. This is the quality content you came for.”

Billy pulls his sketch pad onto his lap and starts penciling in his doodle as more messages appear in the chat. He keeps half an eye out for the familiar faces. “Thank you, ShieldMeStevie. I also agree PunisherDaddy should leave. So should you, though, probably. I just have a feeling Captain America is too busy being a fugitive to shield you from much of anything.” He leans forward to read another message, laughing. “I understand, keep the dream alive. I mean he could shield me too, I guess, if he’s go the time. I won’t complain — no, BuckMeBarnes, that is not Bucky Phobia. I just prefer blondes.” He smiles, all teeth, before turning back to his work.

It’s odd to think back to how uncomfortable his first liveshows were. Some days it’s the only way he gets any work done, now. Before, he felt like he had to talk the whole time or entertain the few people who showed up somehow other than just drawing. But he has regular viewers now, and they talk amongst themselves in the chat for the most part while he works, asking for input occasionally and content to have company that doesn’t otherwise interrupt him.

Twenty minutes later, he holds his sketch up. “Is this not the best damn avocado you’ve ever seen?”

In the chat, TyrionDeservedBetter sends a few rows of side-eye emojis. “Avacados are clearly cyclops their eyes are the pit so tELL ME BILLY why does he have TWO eyes?”

“TyrionDeservedBetter, you make a good point. I will now have to do a series on avocados exploring all the ocular options available to me and repent against my cyclops erasure. I’ve got a fancy-schmancy lunch with a gallery tomorrow, maybe I’ll bring a few of these with me instead of my other pieces.”

The chat starts pinging a cacophony of syncopathic notifications as soon as he says it. Billy has to bite his cheeks to near bleeding to keep his big, dumb smile down. His chest is loose and easy as he reads them over.

“Which gallery?”

“Omg which?

“Congrats rat which one?”

He laughs with his lead-smudged middle finger up at the screen. “Thank you for the clearly heartfelt support, you little shits. I won’t say in case I don’t end up getting to show there and then I’d have to move to Greenland or remote Norway to live out the rest of my shame filled life but I promise I will let you know if it goes well.”

Billy tears the sketch out of the notepad and brings a piece of cardboard he’d torn off one of the boxes he’d shipped into his lap, laying the paper on top of it. He pulls his watercolor tray towards him, mindful about spilling the water in the lid.

“Now who wants to see me fail at watercolor in real time?”

* * *

Rachel Altman is a slight, impeccably groomed brunette that Billy nearly misses altogether, despite her being the only other person in the empty gallery. Her suit jacket is cut slim to her small shoulders, a deep eggplant color that keeps her soft face rosy and sheens in the cool blue overhead light.

“Billy! It’s so nice to meet you in person.”

“Ms. Altman.” He shakes her soft hand like he’s liable to break it in his own sweaty, clumsy one. “Thank you for having me.”

“Rachel, please. How are you liking the city?”

Billy looks around the blank, white walls of the gallery, the slick, polished floors that shine like they’re covered in oil. The air is thin and cool and artificial when he breathes it in; it is the antithesis of Hell’s Kitchen, and it is exactly where he should be. It feels just as too-tight as the walk over in the noise and stink of the city did. He clears his throat.

“It’s an adjustment,” he says honestly. “It’s a lot at once.”

Rachel follows his gaze around the gallery. “Not in here,” she smiles, her eyes only two shades lighter than his own mom’s and crinkling just barely at the corners in the way that speaks of good grooming and maintenance. Billy had worn his nicest dark jeans and the same jacket he’d worn to the funeral as a penance — a reminder, and also a way to suffer in the heat in the walk over — but feels unbearably scrubby now.  

“When you said you were opening a new gallery — I guess I didn’t know you meant brand new like this. It’s different, seeing it all empty in person.”

“You’d be my first exhibit,” she nods. “Let me walk you around while we talk?”

Billy follows the neat clicks of her low, sensible heels like the sound is a leash. “I got my first gallery by accident, you know. I worked in commercial real estate and no one would buy it, so I figured I would try it myself. A hobby, or something; my son was getting older and I didn’t need that empty nest syndrome. I fell in love with it, though. I had never thought of myself as an ‘art’ person. But it’s done well, regardless, so I suppose art isn’t as elitist as I presumed it might be. Maybe I’m just lucky. This particular space has just now become available due to...a legal issue with the previous owner, and I wanted to do something specific with it.”

He stops short when they round back to the front door with his hands buried in his pockets. If she asked him to name a single feature of the gallery he wouldn’t be able to. “My son showed me that first video you made — then I suppose everyone saw you on _Ellen_ after it blew up. The way you approach making your art live with an audience is refreshing, Billy. It feels accessible. I couldn't think of anyone more perfect to open this space with. I want to use it to highlight younger talent specifically. My other gallery is for a specific type of client — very traditional taste. This space is fresher, and I want the work to reflect that. I think your work does.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

She studies him for a moment before smiling widely. “You’re very —”

Behind them, someone knocks on the front door and the smile falls from Rachel’s face so quickly Billy can’t imagine her ever smiling before at all.

“Excuse me,” she murmurs before opening the door, stiff as a board. A man in a navy pinstripe suit and several gold rings heavy on his slim fingers steps inside, smiling in the vacantly pleasant way of someone who is being paid for shallow pleasantries, wholly disingenuous.

“Ms. Altman, I’m happy to see you again. I hope you’ve been well.”

“Mr. Donovan.” She returns his handshake curtly. “Let me introduce you to Billy Kaplan, he’s here about opening an exhibit with me. Billy, this is Benjamin Donovan.”

Billy takes the man’s offered hand, eyes volleying back and forth between the two of them while he tries to place where, exactly, the tension now thick in the room is stemming from.

“Pleasure to meet you, Billy. Unfortunately, I hope you haven’t gotten too far staging your exhibit. My employer wanted me to come by and discuss a few things about the property with Ms. Altman.”

“As I have told Mr. Fisk no less than three times,” Ms. Altman very nearly snaps, “I will not relinquish the deed to this place no matter what he offers.”

“I hope to change your mind, Ms. Altman. As I’ve told you, this gallery has special, personal meaning to Mr. Fisk and Ms. Marianna, and they have renegotiated their offer to better reflect their attachment to Scene Contempo.”

“It’s a pity,” Rachel begins coolly, “that they couldn’t show their attachment before Mr. Fisk was indicted and incarcerated for tearing Hell’s Kitchen to shreds.”

Billy sees Donovan’s grip tighten on the handle of his briefcase. “I assure you, Ms. Altman, that this is an offer you don’t want to reject out of hand. It will be more than Mr. Fisk will offer when he is released.”

Rachel’s eyebrow arches incredulously, and she snorts. “When, in fifteen years? Twenty? Ever? Won’t he die in prison for all he’s done? Doesn’t he _deserve_ that much? I purchased this property through legal means — I understand if that is a foreign concept to _your employer_ but inside prison or out, I won’t sell or turn this gallery over to him or Vanessa Marianna. When you make the conscious choice to commit felonies or be an accomplice to extortion and murder, I believe you forfeit your right to maintain ownership of an art gallery.”

The back door opens as Billy tries to pick his jaw up off from the floor, watching Rachel cross her arms defiantly over her chest.

“Mom? Are you up front?”

Rachel is grinning when she turns to call over her shoulder, and Billy might imagine Mr. Donovan’s face going a bit wan. “In here, Teddy.”

Billy hardly turns to the footsteps clicking echoes into the main area of the gallery, hyperfocused on the angry twist starting to pucker the lawyer’s mouth.

“Is there a problem, mom?”

The new voice is close, a heavy bass over his shoulder, and Billy can’t help a little double take when he finally turns to greet it.

“Teddy,” Rachel grins, holding her arms out. Honestly, Billy has half a mind to do the same. Teddy is broad and blonde and stands a good six or seven inches above Billy’s own lanky six feet. He kisses his mother’s cheek and Billy tries to look cooler and calmer than he feels as the smooth muscles of Teddy’s back ripple under his shirt with the motion.

“There’s no problem, honey. You remember Mr. Donovan, don’t you? Mr. Fisk’s lawyer. He came back with another offer but now that his job is done, he has no reason to stay, isn’t that right? And this handsome gentleman is Billy Kaplan. He’s coming to lunch with us.”

Billy is gonna have an aneurysm.

“Uhm, ‘us’?”

“With us?”

Donovan _tsk_ s, looking over at Billy and Teddy with distaste. “Jesus Christ,” he mutters before turning on his heel and leaving without another word.

“Well that was rude,” Teddy says blandly after two silent beats.

“He’s a lawyer. They only play nice if you pay them to,” Rachel shrugs.

Billy looks between Teddy and Rachel and tries to find any resemblance at all.

“I don’t want to crash your lunch,” he begins slowly, fiddling with his fingers, cracking his knuckles. “I can come back, uhm, another time.”

“Don’t be silly. You and Teddy are right about the same age, this way you can make a friend in the city. Hell’s Kitchen is overwhelming even without gang wars and aliens. And it will be more fun than suffering through lunch with me alone.”

“Mom,” Teddy implores softly, face flushed. His jaw is heavy and square, clenched as he tries to have a silent conversation with his mother. Billy looks down at his shoes. He thought it would be awkward to go, but not that it would be _that_ bad.  

“I promised the young man lunch and I intend to deliver,” she says sharply.

Billy looks up, trying for a smile. It’s business. He needs this show to work. “If you’re sure, ma’am.”

Rachel loops her arm through Billy’s and smiles up at him. “Let’s eat.”

* * *

They walk to a Thai place a block over in silence. Teddy is warm and solid and hulking beside him, and Billy bites the inside of his cheek and keeps his eyes forward.

“Are there any good Thai places in Albany, Billy?”

“I don’t know. I’ve only had it once or twice. I have a — my younger brother Jimmy doesn’t like it. He’s a real picky eater.”

“Is he an artist, too?”

Billy snorts, forces his shoulders to loosen.

“No. He says he doesn’t ‘get’ it. He’s trying to be the next Ronaldo.”

“I tried enrolling Teddy in a soccer league once,” Rachel muses. “Went over like a lead balloon. The other kids wouldn't come near him. Bunch of cowards.”

It startles a genuine laugh straight up from Billy’s gut. Teddy groans to his left.

“Mom is more competitive than I am. The other parents from my basketball team exiled her within a week of joining.”

“Oh. You play still?” He’s unable to look away from the ridges of thick muscle on Teddy’s bicep now. Teddy only shrugs his big shoulders.

“Not much since I graduated high school. Like I said, I’m not really competitive.”

“Shame to let that height go to waste,” Billy tries to joke weakly as the enter the welcome A/C in the restaurant. Teddy only barely smiles back at him. Billy tries to keep his shit together but trips on one of the plush rugs at the entrance.

Everything _sucks_.

Rachel puts Billy and Teddy on the same side of their small table, smirking as their arms brush together, all stiff elbows and under the table knees that seem to be in the wrong place no matter how they both shift.

They order drinks, and then there’s just the clinking noises of silverware from the other tables.

“Oh, right,” Billy says when he can’t stand it anymore, half turning in his seat and looking determinedly at the smooth skin above Teddy’s left eyebrow, because he has never learned when to stop or shut his mouth. “Your mom said you, ah, watch my videos —”

“Not, like, a lot,” Teddy says quickly. Billy asked for that little jabbing pain Teddy gives him, had basically begged for it, so he tries to take it in stride as Teddy continues. “I just...when you do livestreams it’s...nice to have in the background while I’m studying or doing homework or whatever.”

“That’s — I’m glad,” he smiles, and he means it. He tries to. “I work better when I’m doing them, too, to be honest.”

The waiter comes back to take their order and Billy fidgets with the napkin in his lap. Rachel leans forward, both her elbows on the table. At his side, Teddy slumps back in his chair, like in relief.

“Well, Billy. Is there anything I can do to convince you to let us exhibit your work? I hope that little hiccup with Donovan didn’t scare you off too badly.”

“One asshole isn’t going to send me running.”

He stops, suddenly can’t not picture his own mom sitting next to Rachel. “Uhm. Sorry. Forgive my language. I guess it’s not really professional. How many pieces were you thinking?”

“How many are you prepared to give?”

Yellow hope expands his chest impossibly wide; wide as Teddy’s, even, wide despite how Billy hs fucked up today.

The green curry Teddy recommended is delicious, and he and Rachel arrange another meeting Wednesday evening to go through his pieces and set prices. Billy hasn’t done enough good in his life to deserve everything going so well.

They say their goodbyes outside the restaurant, and before Billy can chicken out he catches Teddy’s wrist in the circle of this thumb and forefinger. He fucked up, earlier, and maybe he’s being an asshole by not taking a hint. But — but Billy can’t help himself but to try.

“I — uh. I hope this isn’t weird. I mean, I know it’s a little weird, but...can I get your number? Or give you mine!” He tacks on quickly, his entire face on fire down to each eyelash. “It would be good to know someone nice in the city.”

“Nice,” Teddy repeats slowly.

Billy wants to crawl in a hole.

Teddy sticks out a massive, square hand after visible deliberation.

“Gimme your phone, then.”

* * *

Billy only cries a little when he calls back home, which is much less than both his parents do when he tells them the news. Even Jimmy says he’s happy for him, and for a fourteen year old boy that’s the highest level of emotional literacy anyone could hope for.

“We’re so proud, honey,” his mom says thickly.

He  squeezes his eyes shut and can see them in the living room, his mom curled on his dad’s lap in the recliner, Jimmy sprawled on his stomach on the couch. Billy thinks he can smell the cranberry orange candle on the table.

“You’ve done good, Billy. All by yourself —”

“Not all by myself,” he mutters, chuffed. “I — thank you, again, You put a lot of money down for this apartment, I promise I’ll pay you back once I sell my first piece.”

“Pay us back by taking us on a cruise, numbnuts!” Jimmy pipes up, and Billy chokes on his laughter even as his parents scold him audibly on the other end of the line.

“I’m working on it, you little shit.”

“We’ll be down this weekend, we can do some furniture shopping together and you can show us what this megascreen looks like up close. Your dad wouldn’t believe me when I told him about it.”

“Can’t wait.” He beams to the phone like they could feel it or see it through the line. He’s smiling even when he hangs up, smiles harder when he opens the text Teddy sent to his phone, just to see it.

Billy doesn’t paint that night. He rewatches all three _Hobbit_ movies and spends half of his remaining cash on takeout and lets himself think that it’s easy. That making it is easy and he’s actually maybe talented, maybe he’s got the stuff to make it on his own. Maybe he is running, but maybe he can be doing something else, too. Billy replays every second of his meeting today to prove himself wrong, see where he messed up that will come back to bite him in the ass. The only thing he can think of is that lawyer, Donovan — if Rachel really didn’t mind Billy’s tactless, hopeless attempts at getting her son’s attention, Donovan’s “employer” would be the only wrench in his plans.

Wilson Fisk. Billy had avoided the news as a rule, after everything, but even he has at least heard the name. But what could he possibly have to do with an art gallery?

It’s the only thing he can think of. The end credits roll on _The Battle of the Five Armies_ and Billy makes a decision.

He sits cross legged on his sleeping bag facing the megascreen and googles Wilson Fisk. There’s hundreds of pages of results.

“Shit,” he mutters. He doesn’t know if he cares that much.

Billy clicks on the first link, “A Better Tomorrow,” and skims.

_Fisk spoke plainly about the realities of his upbringing; strictly blue-collar, and strictly paycheck to paycheck, a victim of what he called “systemic poverty and underemployment — the same that still holds the city hostage today.” His father relied on loans and odd-jobs, his mother making due with what she could scrounge from neighbors or manifest, seemingly from midair, from her commitment to keeping her family afloat by her own will._

That doesn’t sound so unusual, if unfortunate. He reads the rest of the article more closely.

_It was during this discussion that Ms. Vanessa Marianna, owner of the art gallery Scene Contempo, spoke up on his behalf, announcing that Fisk has been a quiet but consistent donor to women’s and children’s shelters across New York and nationally for years._

Billy frowns. The rest of the article is a glowing commendation on Fisk’s documented dedication to charitable causes and quiet support of community initiatives in Hell’s Kitchen. He double checks the date on the article to the next one on the _Bulletin_ ’s website. It’s only a few weeks — less than a month — before “Daredevil Collars Fisk.” How could that have changed in such a short window?

_Wilson Fisk has been indicted of over thirty counts of police corruption, money laundering, drug and sex trafficking, and no less than two counts of first degree murder._

Billy accidentally closes out of the window. “No fucking way,” he breathes.

_Fisk escaped federal custody only to be caught in a fierce conflict with the masked vigilante known locally as the Daredevil. Ultimately, Police Sergeant Brett Mahoney reprimanded Fisk, who awaits a trial date on Ryker’s Island._

Billy’s hand flies to his mouth. The _Bulletin_ links Fisk to child sex trafficking, prostitution rings and weapons deals, the death of a reporter named Ben Ullrich and his own _father_ — Billy reads the details he wasn’t even aware newspapers could _print_ until his stomach churns and it threatens to ruin the good day he’s had. That’s who Rachel is up against?

And Donovan thought this man would be out of prison in enough time to manage an art gallery? Why would Fisk even want to put any energy into that? Vanessa was on the lam, as far as the _Bulletin_ could say. It’s not like she’d be around to manage it, either.

It doesn’t sit right no matter how Billy tries to reason it. When tension pounds like an ice pick between his dry, itchy eyes, he slams the laptop closed with more force than is called for.

What did Fisk matter, objectively? He was in jail. He was desperate and power hungry but harmless. It won’t affect his exhibit. It can’t.

He takes a very long shower, but he doesn’t feel much better for it crawling into his sleeping bag and fluffing his pillow, curling around its familiar, lumpy give. If he double checks the lock on his door before doing so, no one is there to see it but him.

That night he dreams he’s Wilson Fisk; he’s knocking someone’s skull in with a hammer from behind and screaming, splinters from the handle sharp in his palms, arms heavy and aching though he keeps swinging even when he knows they’re dead.

His knees finally _thunk_ heavy on the hot, soggy carpet as the hammer slips from his grip, his useless, numb fingers. Blood squelches underneath his weight, stains his trousers. Copper is a heavy tang at the back of his nose, slick and warm nearly up to his elbows, splattered on his face.

Phantom hands roll the body over. It’s different, it’s a different lens, but it’s the same dream he always has. He’s killed Tommy again.

* * *

Billy starts a big, seven foot long canvas and gets half of it sketched out over the weekend after his parents and Jimmy leave, interlocking crowns on an abstract background. Getting the lines straight enough and symmetrical in the backdrop keeps him busy, which is nice, since he doesn't hear from Teddy until Monday afternoon when his phone lights up with a text.

“Hey Billy. This is Teddy Altman. We met last week. I just wanted to let you know if you ever want to get coffee or let me show you around I’m out of class M/W after 3. If not I guess I’ll see you around the gallery.”

Billy is texting back before he even finishes reading Teddy’s message all the way through.

“Not my livestreams? I’m so uncool in person you can’t stand to watch those anymore?”

“No way. The magic’s ruined. They always say you shouldn’t meet your heroes.”

His heart skips a beat, and he drops the pencil held in his left hand.

“Hero, huh?”

Billy sends the Captain America emoji where his shield is proudly raised in one hand, a flag in the other. Teddy sends him an eye roll in return.

“You’re a Cap guy, huh?”

It’s dumb. He is, objectively, risking his exhibit by flirting with the owner’s son. He is also having a coherent, possibly even nice conversation with — if Billy is being objective and cool about it — the corporeal manifestation of like, most of Billy’s non murder, actually fun dreams since he was maybe twelve.

It’s about time he puts his foot in his mouth.

“What can I say? I like blondes.”

“So I’ve heard.”

He frowns at the phone. What did that mean?

A call from a strange number lights his screen up as Teddy texts again. He declines it without looking at the number too hard. He is very busy.

“When can I meet you for coffee, then?”

Billy looks up at the time on his phone, down to his painting clothes. He’d need a shower.

“I’m working on a piece. Give me twenty minutes to clean up and tell me where to meet you.”

Teddy texts him back immediately.

“Cup-la Joe’s. It’s right across from the gallery so you should find it easy. Call me if you get lost, though. I will consider helping you.”

“My knight in shining armor,” he sends back before rising with a stretch that pops all the joints in his back and shoulders. Billy is halfway to the bathroom before his phone dings in his back pocket again, this time with a voicemail.

Frowning, he puts the phone to his ear.

“Mr. Kaplan, hello. This is Vanessa Marianna. I’m calling in regards to an exhibit you’re planning at the Scene Contempo — or, I suppose they may be trying to call it something else now. Regardless, Mr. Kaplan. I’d appreciate you returning my call at your convenience. I look forward to hearing from you.”


	3. 03.

_**03.** _

Kate loved her internship at  _ Thistle  _ enough that she begged to keep at it — even unpaid — despite taking a(n indefinite) year(s) off from classes. She reminds herself of this as she tries to crank through as much work as possible to get home in enough time she can drag her full loot out while Samuel is still in class. Her phone had dinged with an alert from the  _ Bulletin _ ’s Twitter fifteen minutes ago; they had found another body, and released another article on Danny Rand. Talk about her lucky day.

“ _ Dammit _ ,” she hisses. The newly refreshed page on her computer still looks wonky, the photo alignment erratic through the slideshow sitting on top of her article.

“Ah,” Theresa tuts sympathetically from her neighboring desk. Her sleek hair is a shining black mirror that disappears seamlessly into the inky blackness of her Rag and Bone blouse. “Don’t stress about it, Kate. Gus has been fiddling with the code again for some bug only he can see — you might not want to edit it anymore till he gives us the thumbs up.”

Kate pushes back from the desk till her rolling chair bumps into the wall behind her with a frustrated scream only just bitten down. 

“What’s your rush anyway?” Theresa asks, dimpled chin propped on her hand. “Emily hasn’t even sent you her revisions for that, has she?”

“I just want it to be right before she looks at it again,” Kate shrugs.

Theresa eyes her critically. “You’re asking her for a favor.”

Her bangs were getting too long, but she has to wait another two weeks until she can go back to the salon. She rummages for a clip in her desk drawer to pin them back before answering so she doesn’t fidget with them. Kate had, actually, planned on doing just that after looking through her files at home...but if Theresa is bringing it up now, it’s best to roll with it. “I am  _ considering _ pitching an idea.”

“Bishop. Do I have to remind you your last idea went over like a lead balloon? Something about ‘delivery issues that put Pizza Hut to shame.’”

“ _ She _ is the one who suggested we start covering more things of substance than the inside of women’s bathroom cabinets, alright? And we worked out a compromise anyway! That interview with the Planned Parenthood communications manager had our highest hits in February.”

“The Planned Parenthood communications director also spent half the write up talking about her favorite blue-based red lipstick.”

“And how they help her feel confident when she lobbies Congress,” Kate counters, eyes sharp. “It’s not mutually exclusive, wearing makeup and being competent, as you and everyone else in this office know. I’m not suggesting we turn into the  _ Bulletin  _ or the  _ Bugle _ , I just think  _ Thistle _ can expand its niche while we have the opportunity to stretch our legs a bit more than usual. We have a captive audience of young women who read our stuff every day!”

“Yes, we do,” Emily says drily from behind her. Emily is thirty-two and cooler and more productive than what a socialite, by all accounts, has to be.  _ Thistle  _ was a vanity project turned unexpected empire, and Emily defended it with her charmingly-gapped teeth bared. Kate has seen that protectiveness intimidate a lot of people who expected her to be some vacant, idiot rich girl.

She juts her chin out as Emily waves an impeccably manicured hand in her direction, bony hip against the desk, from one idiot rich girl to another. Emily tuts. She’s still got a tan line from her ski goggles. It looks good, and also like she’s put some bronzer around the edges to make it look deeper than it actually is. “Just tell me your idea, Kate. You don’t have to butter me up.”

Theresa becomes very interested in her own screen, but her mouth is pursed. She’s the third employee Emily ever hired and over the ten years she’d worked for  _ Thistle _ had more than earned her reputation as “Switzerland” in the office. She even had a miniature Swiss flag on her desk. Kate rolls her eyes.  _ Coward _ .

“Sure I do, Boss Lady. Have you ever tried asking yourself for a favor? But if you insist.” Kate takes a deep breath. She really hadn’t planned this part out yet. “I was thinking maybe we could do a series that focuses on self care and professionalism, right? Ask what the routine is to keep working women looking the way they like and how that affects their career and how they see their jobs.”

“If you were unaware, we do that already. Every day, nine a.m., ‘Most Valuable Products.’ I think you yourself have written no less than ten articles for it. Sound familiar?”

“In practice, a sentence saying they work for a hedge fund in an undefined capacity before nine-hundred words of their skincare and workout routine doesn’t really cut it for what I’m visualizing. Think about it, Em. It might even be a good chance for the readers to network.”

“We could do a Google Hangout,” Theresa interjects, still looking at her computer. Kate shoves at her shoulder, grinning.  _ I take it back, you beautiful Swiss bastard _ . 

“That’s a good idea! Maybe we have them — do a face mask or something, paint their nails, whatever that will convince you — and answer reader questions, live-time, about their jobs or college or accounting. Whatever it is that they do. Something  _ extra _ . No one is doing anything like that now. Everything else is becoming more accessible — that would be like, a crowd sourced interview. We don’t have to guess about what questions they want answered because the readers can ask them themselves! We —”

“Kate.” Emily interjects evenly. “There is, very literally, a gang war tearing the city into pieces. People can’t leave their homes without wondering if they’re going to get caught in that crossfire or — or  _ punished _ by some vigilante who apparently no one can contain. We cannot also expect them to do our jobs for us. The least we can do is give them a few moments of escapism, Kate. Sometimes a lipgloss can just be a really nice lipgloss.”

“The least we can do is give them something to live for —” She winces. Too dramatic. Emily crosses her arms, brow raised expectantly as Kate backpedals. “I mean, give them something to think about besides waiting for Punishers and human shaped earthquakes to find them. Mascara can do that for a few minutes, you are absolutely right and I love it, but you know, if we use that platform to get them interested in — I don’t know. Finance, politics, chemical engineering, whatever — that’s making a  _ big _ difference. It could make them feel like they can do something besides sit around and wait for things to go badly. Legally. Not vigilante or superhero, superspy related.”

“This isn’t  _ TIME _ or the  _ Wall Street Journal _ .”

“And I love it, that’s why I want to keep working here and I think that’s why this can actually work. I’m not saying we do those boring profile pieces about their charitable causes and how they do Round B fundraising. But maybe we can talk about a little bit more than just what toners they like?”

“Kate,” Theresa interjects delicately, “do you yourself not possess no less than six toners —”

“Toners are not the real issue at hand, here —”

“I don’t see how that’s a real pitch, Kate,” Emily sighs, rolling the sleeves of her J. Crew blouse up to her elbows. “If you want to write more about their career in your pieces, that’s on you to do. Write it and let me see what you can do. I can’t bring what you’ve given me just now to the rest of the team without making it sound like our unofficial and unpaid intern thinks everything we do is superficial.”

Kate frowns. Emily knows she doesn’t mean it like that, so she brushes it off to grab at the opportunity she’s been given.

“Can I, then? Show you what I have in mind? Would you read it?”

Emily and Theresa share a long look over the top of her head. 

“You have someone in mind that good, Katie? What is this really about?”

“Boss Lady, when have I ever not had a plan?”

Theresa kicks her leg underneath the desk, and Emily pinches at the bridge of her nose.

“What would you say if I could get us Joy Meachum?”

Emily’s hands fall to her sides. 

_ Gotcha.  _

* * *

Her apartment is a compromise she made with her father when she was admitted to NYU. He labored under the unfounded assumption that the entirety of Greenwich Village was inherently dangerous — as bad as the Kitchen or Five Points, he’d maintained, vehemently and incorrectly— and refused to set her up in an apartment north of Tribeca, if she had to move down from their home in Carnegie Hill at all.

Objectively, in retrospect, Kate realizes it’s mostly a real estate investment on his part. She’ll move out of it eventually and he can sell it at a higher price than he bought it as years put distance between the city and the Incident and the only memories of it are the viral clips turned into memes on Facebook or Tumblr. Nothing that actually hurt anyone. Not in real life, as far as anyone who’s looking for a piece of real estate, price adjusted once the period of collective mourning has passed, is concerned. 

It’s also, objectively, obnoxious. She and Samuel couldn’t take up all the space in it if they tried. For two seemingly perpetual college students, it was too much. For Kate’s recreational use, however, she can’t deny the square footage is damn handy. Not that she would ever thank her dad for it.

Kate locks both of the deadbolts she’d installed herself on her bedroom door and brings out her tac knife to rest on the edge of her desk in easy reach. The blinds are shut, and Kate docks her phone onto the speaker next to her computer and queues up Britten’s first cello suite. 

Her files are split up half alphabetically, half reverse chronologically. It won’t really matter if anyone found them, and wouldn’t slow them down by much, but it was nice to feel like she was taking all the preventative measures she could. After spreading each folder out in a big fan shape on her floor, she lays belly down on the plush carpet and starts on the new one she’s created for Danny Rand with her neat, blocky handwriting.

 

**Daniel “Danny” Thomas Rand**

  * Date of Birth: 5 April, 1989
  * Death: 29 October, 2001 (? Circumstances unclear)( _NY_ _Bulletin_ , “Rand Family Presumed Dead Following Tragic Plane Crash,” Jennifer Jackson, 30 October 2001)
  * Return to NY: 8 May, 2016 ( _NY Bulletin,_ “Rand Rises,” Gina Doherty, 15 May 2016)
  * Parents: Wendell Thomas Rand (17 March 1954 - 29 October, 2001), Heather Duncan Rand (8 November 1962 - 29 October 2001, née Heather Elizabeth Duncan)
  * Potential Affiliates:


  1. Joy Marie Meachum (b. 7 August, 1987)( _NY_ _Bulletin_ , “Rand Family Presumed Dead Following Tragic Plane Crash,” Jennifer Jackson, 30 October 2001)
  2. Joseph “Ward” Meachum (b. 19 November, 1984)( _NY Bulletin_ , “Rand Family Presumed Dead Following Tragic Plane Crash,” Jennifer Jackson, 30 October 2001)
  3. Jerri Hogarth (b. 27 December, 1972)( _NY Bulletin_ , “Daniel Rand, Corporate Hero,” Jennifer Many, 21 May 2016)



 

Fifteen years. What the hell could a twelve year old be up to for fifteen years in the Himalayas, if he actually even survived at all? 

Big if. 

There’s a picture of him on the front page from his supposed return, and she compares it to the one of him as a boy from the first article with a magnifying glass from her desk drawer before rising to flop into her desk chair, clicking around on her computer. There’s enough people googling Danny Rand now she doesn't bother with a proxy.

Kate hums thoughtfully as she prints out a copy of the  _ Bulletin  _ article they’d published today from her desktop. Danny had pulled some weight with the board to keep the prices of their new drug low, apparently, which does not tell her much of anything she wants to know but smells like something she should investigate regardless. (She jots down “Tension with the board? Potential Enemies —” with a list of the Board’s names underneath. It’s better than nothing.) Kate goes back to the first article in her file, looking for something she missed. The author says the Rands were en route to a vacation in Beijing at the time of the crash, but as Kate pulls up a map of China and Central Asia to print and attach to his file, she thinks that’s likely not true. 

_ Just three weeks ago, Heather Rand spoke at a private dinner function with Mr. Clark “Sandy” Randt Jr., U.S. Ambassador to China, and Mr. Wang Ying-fan, permanent representative of the People’s Republic of China to the United Nations, about Rand Enterprise’s contributions to the countries’ joint universal primary education initiatives, one of the UN’s Millennium Summit Goals.  _

She runs her highlighter over this paragraph, circles the names of the ambassadors to dig into later and marks the presumed crash site and Beijing both on the map. It’s more footnote than anything, not followed up with much detail or context as Danny and Wendell got most of the story’s real estate, but Kate is stuck on it. Rand was clearly involved in some reasonably moderate-level political shit with China — so why the story they were going on “vacation” in October, the start of the last fiscal quarter, when Kate knows for a fact that’s when Rand would be tidying up their accounts and reporting to investors for the previous fiscal year, preparing for the new one? Couldn’t they have just said it was a business trip? That would have made more sense.

Frowning, Kate googles “average Beijing temperature October.”

Low of forty-five degrees fahrenheit, the high only up to sixty-six. That doesn’t sound very relaxing or conducive to entertaining a twelve year old boy — that sounds like a week stuck in a hotel room watching television and playing a gameboy.

She snorts, unable to stop herself. When she puts it like that it doesn’t sound so bad, really. 

Kate drums her fingers on the desk before grabbing at her notebook, starting another page:

 

**Joy Marie Meachum**

  * Rand Operations in China?
  * Education Initiatives(?)
  * Current China Branch Managers
  * Heather Duncan Rand Legacy Philanthropic Initiatives (Look into other tax write-offs?)



 

In the space between Britten’s suite and Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, Kate thinks she hears the front door open. Her body goes rigid as she turns the volume knob down quickly, straining her ear for more noise. She doesn’t hear anything, but goes and makes a round of the rest of the apartment to be sure, knife tucked in the back of her jeans.

Nothing. That’s good. That should be good. 

She stops for a Diet Coke in the kitchen and tells herself to get her shit together. She doesn’t have time to chase all the ghosts in Manhattan, not when she’s so close to getting her hands on a ghost of her own.

Back in her room, Kate stares down at her Meachum and Rand files for a moment longer before flipping them closed. She still has to meet with Joy to fill the bulk of them out, anyway. There are more pressing things to be done. 

Kate is careful pulling out the pictures from this weekend, taking the time to look at them, now, as she places them flat on the glass plate of her copier. The little whirring noises it makes scanning the images are a steady thrum underneath the cello suite that together turn into white noise cocooning her as she takes the magnifying glass to each picture, jotting down notes. Partial addresses, plates, storefronts. She stares at the ultrasound for an especially long time, trying to make heads or tails of where the body is, what is the peanut shaped head and what are the nubby, half-formed toes. 

There’s no name on it, even scribbled on the back. She wonders what they decided on, if it was a girl or a boy or if it even ended up being born.

Her throat is thick as she makes her copy. Kate can’t reason these smiling pictures — some posed, most candid and a little blurry — with the ones she pulls from her other folders.

The bodies in the pictures are beaten to varying degrees, but there’s a stack she keeps clipped together with a single, unifying feature: an entry wound, a single one, neat and uniformly four inches below the left shoulder, four inches inward to the center of the chest.

Skin tears differently with an arrowhead, doesn’t singe around the edges of the entry point like how a gun does, doesn’t stretch to expand or accommodate the width of the head like it does a bullet. The pictures she can get from the papers or conspiracy blogs aren’t police evidence quality; most of them are blurry and mid-range at best, long distance by and large, and she’s found only one where the arrow was still attached to the body, though it could have been passed off as something else from the distance. But Kate knows a bowman when she sees one. The fact that they go through the effort of removing their arrows after the shot tells her they’d probably like to try and convince a particularly thick-skulled, unobservant cop or coroner that this is a bullet wound. If she were a betting woman, she’d reckon they were hoping to point towards Frank fucking Castle, who has become the culprit of everything from street violence to income disparity to child soldiers in the Horn of Africa since his Houdini stunt from Ryker’s Island. Plenty of the victims are convicted criminals themselves, so the MO seems to overlap, even just a little. Enough to nudge someone in that direction, if they were already inclined to believe it.

But they don’t use a gun, and that means they also like the gamble.

Kate pulls out her cellphone and scrolls through to find the pictures she’d taken in the shed. She sends them to the printer and deletes the files from the phone before comparing the arrow she’d found behind their trash bin to the blurry puncture wound she’d magnified to pixelation in one of the pictures. 

The diameter looks like it would be about right, and if it was a fish point like what’s in her shed picture it would rip wide and oblong on the way back out like it does in the photograph. It might be passed off as a sawed off muzzle pressed close to the skin — point blank range, maybe, but if they’d tested for gunpowder surely it would have come back clean. 

Unless the police wanted to blame Castle or whoever, too? Would that really be better for quelling public hysteria than a bowman on the loose? 

_ Only one homicidal vigilante to worry about here, folks, and lucky for you he doesn’t rely on a stick and some string.  _

It’s not a lot to go on. In reality, it’s nothing. She can admit that, very quietly, to herself. But she feels a weight sink in her gut regardless. She’ll follow this thread until she’s absolutely sure she’s wrong.

Her eyes flick up to the map she’d spread on her bed, 8.5x11 sheets of paper she’d collaged together to show the city in detail on a big foam board. Kate walks over to where she’d placed pins for each body she’d made a file for.

Frank Castle’s pins were green, her bowman in blue. There are other pins she thinks she can tie to others, but for now she ignores them, lifts the board this way and that, holds it flat at eye level, places it down on the floor and prowls circles around it. 

The blue and green overlap, sure. Frank Castle and Daredevil didn’t themselves own crime in Midtown. But Kate’s bowman isn’t in Hell’s Kitchen. The blue dots are erratic across the city— heavier in some places than others, maybe. Harlem is largely untouched, while Murray Hill and East Williamsburg are dense with hits to the point the pins nearly outgrow their limits on the map. But they stop east of Clinton Hill like there’s a barrier keeping them out. 

Or in. Kate pulls up the  _ Bulletin _ ’s archive and does a location based search, but it comes back clean.

Kate’s bowman is in Bed-Stuy.

* * *

She doesn’t make the trip for another three days. Kate had planned to go that weekend, truth be told; but Samuel has a last minute date Thursday night and she can’t miss the opportunity to not excuse her absence.

“Will you call me when you’re on the way home?”

Samuel sends her an incredulous look where he’s shoving his wallet in his back pocket, one hand reaching for their front door.

“How dare you wish that on me. The correct thing to say is, ‘I hope I don’t see you until the morning, limping in and dehydrated, with tales of a virile, limber companion in tow.’”

Kate rolls her eyes, makes a show of tucking her robe around her more tightly where she’s sprawled on the couch, watching HGTV.

“I mean it, Sammy.”

“Alright,  _ alright,  _ Granny. Cool it with QVC while I’m gone, though. Last time you went on a home shopping binge I was the one having to sign for all the packages while you were in Sag Harbor with your aunt.”

“And you call me the party pooper.”

“Good _ bye _ , Katie.”

Kate sits through two and a half more episodes of  _ House Hunters _ before rising from the couch. Nerves gnaw at her hot feeling belly, her hands shake.

She refuses. She isn’t a coward. Kate runs a bath, throws in some pink, rose scented epsom salts and sets her phone timer for twenty minutes. She scrubs until she’s pink herself before slathering some lilac body butter onto her freshly shaved legs, pats on her most expensive face cream and braids her damp hair into two long plaits before pinning them back around the base of her skull.

It’s better. She fits in her body now that she’s arranged it the way she wants it. Kate pulls on a stretchy pair of yoga pants and a big hoodie she can hide two knives under before yanking on a pair of sneakers. All her fake IDs are sorted in a false drawer in her jewelry box, pinned together for convenience’s sake. She grabs her “student” set (New Jersey driver’s license, CUNY student ID, half-punched frozen yogurt loyalty card, and $50 in cash in a cheap pleather credit card holder) and hangs her camera around her neck before popping the case off her phone and taking her apartment key off the ring she keeps the others on. 

She has to be ready now, regardless.

Kate makes a show of taking a few pictures in the bus terminal before it rolls up, and keeps one headphone in her ear playing Amy Winehouse on the lowest volume possible while she slouches in her hard, plastic seat playing Best Fiends. It is the longest bus trip of her life.

She makes a walk around The Hill, hoodie up, when the bus finally lets her off, snapping pictures of the Historic District as night sinks to full indigo around her. St. Mary’s Episcopal actually does look cool in the yellowing streetlight, not that Kate can really bring herself to give a shit about anything other than the gnawing maw in her belly. The lead she has is nothing, maybe, and yet she’s never been so close.

Each minute longer she has to waste moseying around The Hill before she lets herself walk to Bed-Stuy is agony. Finally turning onto Classon Avenue and muting her headphones is a blessed relief, is freefall in her stomach she has to lean into.

Right.

Bowman doesn’t shit where he sleeps, but no bowman that good and content to make that many enemies would live in a place without a birdseye view. Frank Castle was a mercenary with excellent aim, maybe, but her bowman was a sniper, straight up, and that’s what she’s counting on as she eyes the buildings around her critically.

Kate aims her lens to top floor corner apartments as she walks through Bed-Stuy, snapping their street location and relevant signage in between. She pays special attention to buildings at least five stories high, and even among those the ones with roof access she can see from the street, littered with laundry lines or one even wafting down the noise and smell of a barbecue. After twenty minutes, Kate stumbles upon a row of buildings that are the exact same height, the four of them close enough to conceivably dart between like nothing, even for someone not in particularly good shape. Or, reasonably, one loaded down with no less than sixty pounds of a specialty recurve bow and a load of custom arrows.

A wide smile stretches her face in two so suddenly and heavy it aches.

“Why, hello there,” she nearly purrs as she starts clicking away. She had  _ done it again _ !

“Miss! Hey, Miss!”

_ Goddammit. _

She bites back a groan and turns on her heel to face the voice, wide eyed and hands half raised in front of her, still clenching her camera. 

“Uhm, listen, I don’t want any trouble —”

“Hey, woah, it’s alright. Sorry,” the man interrupts her, his own hands raised in placation. His eyes are very blue in his blandly handsome, heavily jawed face, stubbled with the same sandy hair thick on his head. “I didn’t mean to spook you. But I guess there’s no avoiding it, things being what they are lately.”

Kate is tense as he takes another step closer, his eyes drifting up over her shoulder to the buildings behind her. He’s big — easily six feet and change, body heavy with muscle she can see stretching his plain t-shirt, collared with sweat like he’s just come from a run — and he’s clearly trying to be careful to not intimidate her. It sets her teeth on edge, no one is this careful unless they have a reason to be. He’s overcompensating for something.

“Listen, I really don’t have the time for whatever this is, so —”

“This is private property, Miss.” He pauses, looking her over again thoughtfully, taking no pains to hide it. “The landlord is actually a real asshole, if you’ll forgive my language. I just wanted to let you know.”

“I’m a student at CUNY, I was just taking pictures for a project, it’s not anything —”

The stranger smiles a bit, even showing some of his teeth, before gesturing towards the camera held in her white knuckled hands.

“I know what you were doing, Miss. I just wanted to let you know that you shouldn't.”

Kate is very tired of being interrupted, very tired of the schoolgirl act, and very ready to be rid of this asshole.

“Okay,” she breathes, mostly for show. The man can get whatever sick thrill he wants from scaring her and she can turn heel and outrun him if she has to. She got the pictures anyway. “I’ll just...go then. Thanks for the heads up.”

There’s an iron grip on her bicep as soon as she turns around. Kate jerks back reflexively, barely able to stop herself from clocking him, with enough force that her phone and ID tumble out of her massive hoodie pockets and clatter to the pavement. 

“Oh, shit. Miss —” he stoops to grab her fallen belongings, other hand still loose at her elbow. “— Charlotte? That’s a pretty name. I was going to say if you have a project you could try calling the owner during office hours. You’re pretty enough I think you could work something out — maybe even in the daylight,” the stranger finishes, smiling. His hand is slow brushing against hers as he returns the phone and ID.

“Thanks for the free advice,” she says, freeing herself from his grip and all but jogging back to the nearest bus stop. Her heart is lodged in her throat, no matter how she tries to shake it free. 

Something is not right. She’s fucked up, and she’s not sure by how much.

Kate takes the bus to Bushwick, rides another to the North Side before getting off and walking to the nearest coffee shop to enjoy a leisurely cup of light roast and a strawberry cream cheese bagel. The bus routes she pulls up on her phone let her know that she can still make her planned trip to NoHo to grab some dinner before calling an Uber to a hotel she’ll only book once she’s back in Manhattan, feigning drunkenness, texting Samuel a lie about a booty call.

She wins three rounds of Best Fiends on her final bus ride, which is great, until she’s two blocks into NoHo and realizes she’s being followed.

_ Fuck _ .

Alright, last minute change of plans, then. She can do this. Kate keeps her pace steady as she makes her way to the Flatiron District. The line of her back prickles no matter how many turns and circle-backs she makes.

Kate comes to a stop in front of a Korean grocery store, skin flushing cold and suddenly clammy. She’s only made it obvious that she knew she was being followed.

Shit. Shit. Shit —  _ fuck. _

She has to keep moving, find somewhere to perch and wait them out. There’s a ladder leading up to a set of emergency stairs at the side of this building. Kate bolts for them, breathing shallow, keeping low to the ground as she can.

It’s three rungs of the ladder up before the air whistles behind her. 

Kate pivots, dropping her grip on the ladder instantly and falling heavily to the balls of her feet with a  _ thunk _ that burns into her knees. She isn’t fast enough, though. The arrow sinks into the meat of her bicep as Kate tumbles behind the dumpster four feet to her left. The second and third shots  _ thunk _ into the ground where she had stood, then dent the metal of the dumpster.  

Her arm trembles uncontrollably and she bites back a cry when her landing jostles the arrow. She reaches dumbly for one of the knives underneath her hoodie with the hand not tingling numbness.  _ Fuck _ . Kate tucks one in the waist of her pants, brandishes the other with the best grip she can manage.

The rattling of her breathing is too loud, but it’s hard to bring it down to listen for footsteps overhead or the whine of more arrows loosed. Kate nearly bites her tongue in two trying as she rises to a crouch. Her bowman would come to collect his arrows, she just needed to wait for him to get close enough she could see the bastard. If she ran he would just follow.

“Miss Charlotte? I hear you breathing down there, Miss Charlotte Rowell, CUNY ID 1089654. You’re such a looker, do you count on that to make up for being sloppy?”

The stranger from before is in front of her only a second after she hears the first footfall. His bow isn’t even raised; it rests slung over his shoulder, like she isn’t even a threat he has to worry about.

“It’s one of the worst fakes I’ve ever seen in my life, by the way. But thanks for that Grant, I’ll put it to good use tomorrow and think of you.”

“I really don’t give a shit,” she pants, her injured arm half hidden behind her as she rises fully, weight spread evenly on her feet, shoulder width apart. 

He cocks his head to look at her.

“You aren’t going to beg for my name? For me to not kill you?”

Kate leers at him, and lunges.

Her knife makes an incision five inches long half an inch above his left kidney, and she takes cold, vicious pleasure in it before he decks her. She spits blood as she stumbles back, eyes still half closed when he presses her against the wall, her own knife twisted up to her throat and a knee between her legs keeping her off balance. She can’t bite back the sob that comes straight from the white pain radiating out from her arm, and he grins at her as he takes the end of the arrow in his hand and twists it deeper.

“Tell me your name, sweetheart. I’m not used to an idiot so green trying to find me, I want to remember you properly. You’re very brave, yeah? Shame they sent you on a suicide mission, you’d probably grow into some talent eventually. SHIELD takes what they can get now, I suppose.”

She jerks away when the hand on his arrow moves to pet her hair. Her left hand is pressed close to the second knife she’d moved to the waist of her pants. Just a little further — 

“God you talk a lot,” she snarls, black spotting her vision when she bucks towards him with all her might, knee hitting his groin when she gets him a few steps off balance. Her injured arm swings forward as he stumbles backwards and she nearly slices his eye out but he’s fast, she only lands on his cheekbone.

“You should put more lotion on your hands, you know, if you’re going to be lazy. They’re rough where you’re holding the bow wrong.”

“Here I thought you were trying to kill me, not tutor me.” 

Her left arm is numb from the elbow down, the grip on her knife clumsy. She’s got to end it. He takes a step forward, slow and easy, and she feints a mirroring step backwards before lunging forward, wrapping her limbs around him.

“Darling, in  _ public _ —”

She drops the knife, bites his ear, and pulls. He can’t get to his bow how she’s wrapped around his middle, and as he’s struggling to pry her away she grabs his head between both her hands and slams it back against the brick wall, using the weight of her whole body to better throw him back.  Kate keeps smashing it against the brick even as she hears the  _ shnickt  _ of a butterfly knife being opened underneath her. She drops down and backs up to the wall opposite when she feels his arm shift in the confines of her legs, but only for a moment before charging forward. A solid punch to his jaw, a kick to the cut she’d made at his side that has him stumbling proper, already disoriented from his skull meeting the brick wall.

He grabs her ankle when his knees meet the pavement, but she swings out with her other leg and kicks at his head as she falls, grabbing his knife as well as her own before scrambling back up.  Kate hardly checks to see if he’s really down before making her stilted way up the emergency ladder, loot clutched to her chest. She hops to the next roof over before she allows herself to look at her arm.

She can’t well run into the city with an arrow hanging out of her, but she also can’t go to the hospital — an injury like this would be too easy to look up, even if she used her fakes, which — her stomach is a block of ice as her hands meet the vacancy in her pocket. Which she doesn’t even have any more. God _ dammit _ . 

Kate pulls her phone out, cracked to pieces but working, mercifully, and still with her (that matters, a very small voice in her hindbrain tells her) and googles where the arteries in the body are. It’s not bleeding enough Kate is really worried the arrow hit one, but she isn’t about to risk pulling it out herself and bleeding to death. It’s closer to the outside of her arm, though, so she grabs the shaft in her sweaty fist and pulls before she can think about it much more than that.

“ _ GodfuckingwankingSHIT _ !” She sobs when it breaks free. Before Kate can sink into the pain of it she shrugs off her hoodie, sniffling weakly, her lips tasting of salt, and peels her tanktop off to tourniquet the wound. She puts the knives in the hoodie pockets and tucks the arrow underneath her sports bra, the head poking up between the valley of her breasts and leading straight down to her navel, the end tucked into the waistband of her pants, before zipping it back up, scrubbing at her face with her hands.

He’ll be awake soon if he isn’t already. Kate makes for the stairs leading down from the roof access of this building — apartments, as it turns out, smelling of garlic and sharp spice — and tries to look like she hasn’t just been brawling in an alley. Her hoodie is flipped up to cover her face, and she takes the long way around to the only place she knows to go, which makes her a shitty person, all things considered.

Kate’s face is clammy with sweat when Tommy opens the door, and she all but falls into his chest as her weak legs and aching feet threaten to give up on her altogether.


	4. 04.

_**04.** _

Teddy somehow orders a coffee that is the exact opposite of what he actually wants, but is too embarrassed to correct it as he moves to the side to allow Billy to order. 

“Hot coffee in this weather? Are you even human?” Billy teases, nudging his shoulder with his own. 

“Sometimes I wonder,” Teddy tells him, very close to honesty. 

Billy grins at him roguishly before ordering an iced coffee more syrup than bean water. Something on his face must give him away, because Billy flushes a bit as they walk to the side of the counter to collect their drinks.

“You aren’t one of those purists, right? Are you going to judge my caffeination practices?”

“I’m sure I can find something better to judge you for,” Teddy smiles over his shoulder as they walk to an available table next to the big front window. Warm sunlight streams through that throws Billy’s hair into rich relief, curling fluffy and soft at the crown of his head and buzzed short at the sides and underneath. It’s the kind of cool haircut Teddy wishes he could pull off, and his palms start to sweat only partly due to the heat of the cup and what radiates through the window; no small part of it is Teddy squashing the urge to run his fingers through it, wondering what it would feel like.

If Billy would let him, considering how Teddy acted before. How Teddy always acts, when he first wants something. Denial. Social ineptitude.

Billy cocks his head to the side and Teddy freezes, sure that the want that had possessed his body was somehow visible.

“Do I have something on my face already?”

“Maybe I wouldn’t tell you if you did,” Billy smirks. “I just — your eyes were blue the other day, I thought. But they look green now. Uhm, really — a nice green,” he finishes softly, face pink. “That was weird, I’m sorry.”

Teddy’s ears are on fire, but his stomach is roughly the size and temperature of an ice cube. 

_ Oh no. _

“Well, I suppose now’s as good a time as any to tell you about the shape-shifting,” he says flatly after a moment’s pause.

Billy’s face splits into a beatific smile — he has dimples, Teddy realizes miserably.  _ Dimples _ . — and he chokes a bit around the straw of his drink as he guffaws.

“I hope that’s on your Tinder profile.”

Teddy takes a relieved gulp of his coffee.  _ Swerve successful. _

“With my luck I’d end up swiping right on the Punisher.”

Billy leers at him. “There’s so much to unpack there, Teddy. Why would Frank Castle have a Tinder? How would he have the time to maintain it? Would swiping right on him be the worst thing you could do?”

Teddy groans. “Don’t tell me you’re one of his weird-ass fanboys.”

“I’m not one of those 4chan fascists,” Billy says flatly before looking out the window, thoughtful. “In another universe, maybe. He’d be pretty fine if he didn’t. You know.”

“Kill people.”

“It’s a hard limit. I stan for Luke Cage and Cap, though. My unproblematic faves.”

“Captain America is a fugitive who gave the U.N. the middle finger and Luke Cage is in jail,” Teddy laughs.

“Luke Cage is in jail?!”

“Do you not go on the internet except for your liveshows?” He huffs, exasperated and oddly fond.

Billy leans back in his seat. “Cap is on a romantic honeymoon with his boyfriend and Luke Cage remains unavailable...I suppose that just leaves you, then.”

Teddy nearly falls out of his chair.  _ Keep it together, Altman _ .

“Sucks to be you.”

It’s quiet for a moment where they both just smile at each other and drink their coffees. It’s nice.

“Thanks for asking me...out, I guess,” Billy mumbles, shifting a bit in his seat. 

Teddy bites the inside of his cheek, feels something warm bloom in his middle, stretching its legs and taking up as much space as his body allows. 

_ Embarrassing. _

“It’s just — on my way back from class, you know?”

“Oh. Oh, right. Yeah. What do you study? Are you an artist, too?”

He snorts. “I’m going to be an accountant.”

“Oh. That’s...exciting.”

“Not to cut your acting career off before it gets its legs, but maybe you should stick to painting.”

“I’ll have you know, Scorsese, I made a  _ brilliant _ Tree #2 in my first grade play. Much better than Tommy —”

Billy cuts himself off, and now that there’s no screen and no crowd of other anonymous viewers separating them Teddy can’t help but press, wanting to take advantage of having Billy’s full attention.

“Who?”

“Oh. Uhm. Tommy’s my — he’s my brother. My twin. Fraternal — he’s my brother.”

“...And how did he mess up being a tree?”

“He couldn’t make himself stand still,” Billy smiles, tender like pressing a yellowing bruise.  _ They must be close. _

“I can’t imagine having a sibling, much less a twin,” Teddy muses, staring out at the traffic on the street next to them. “Will he be down for the exhibit when it opens? I want to get all the embarrassing stories —”

“He’s dead.”

Teddy drops his thankfully mostly empty coffee. He is the world’s biggest asshole.

“Oh, my god. Oh — I am. Sorry. So sorry, I didn’t mean —”

“It’s fine, really. It was few years ago.”

“It doesn’t matter how long it’s been. It hurts the same.”

Billy looks up at him fully then, eyes soft and open and a little red, and nods.

“It does.”

They go through two more cups of coffee each; the sun is low and pink when they finally leave the shop. Their arms are sticky with sweat as they brush past each other, but neither of them move away. 

“Is it alright if I walk you home?”

Billy nudges his elbow with his own. “Rachel raised a gentleman. Yeah, come on. You can look at the piece I started and let me know what you think.”

“Really?” 

“I make a habit to not say things I don’t mean,” Billy says with a wry twist to his mouth. Teddy fights to keep from slinging an arm around his shoulders, or catching his fingers with his own, as they make their way back to Billy’s building. 

Not a date. Not a date.

Billy’s apartment building was nice, once. It’s not the worst place Teddy’s ever seen, by far, but is past its prime in a way that’s more concerning than charming. Maybe his mom has just rubbed off on him too much.

“Oh!”

Teddy jogs the last few steps to catch the door and hold it open for a well dressed man with a walking stick.

“Thank you,” he says. Teddy just shrugs and grins before he catches himself.

“Oh, I mean. No problem!” He calls out quickly, but the man is already making his way up the stairs.

“Chivalry lives,” Billy chuckles, clapping him on the shoulder as he enters, leaving Teddy only to follow. 

* * *

“You’re home awfully late,” his mom muses as Teddy tries to shut the front door as softly as he’s able, hardly bearing any weight at all on his feet as he tip-toes into their living room.

He freezes.

“It’s barely eleven,” he says after a minute. His mom chuckles.

“And you’re creeping into your own home like a thief in the night.”

“I’m not  _ creeping _ ,” Teddy huffs, walking over to the recliner where she’s curled, iPad in her lap and a glass of wine on the end table next to her. He kisses her smiling cheek.

“Did you have fun today?”

“Yeah. He showed me the new painting he started, it looks really cool.”

“You spent…” she makes a show of looking at her iPad, “six and a half hours looking at a painting?”

“And now I’m going to spend the next several years studying in my room and avoiding all human interaction trying to forget this conversation.”

“Leftovers are wrapped up in the fridge!” His mom calls to his retreating back. 

His mom is the worst cook known to mankind, and probably at least on several other planets as well, not that it kept her from trying. Teddy bypasses the plate of he-doesn’t-want-to-know to reach for some turkey and sandwich accoutrements and a can of Sprite. He takes his sandwich to his bedroom and is no sooner sat cross-legged on his bed when his phone dings.

“Let a man eat in peace,” he huffs, pulling his laptop close and ignoring the text as he loads up the  _ Game of Thrones _ episode he missed last night. It’s probably Rory asking for their ECON homework.

It dings again.

“ _ Fwughhh _ ,” Teddy groans around a mouthful of food, blindly grabbing for his phone.

“Feeling *~*inspired*~* today. Livestream in 10!!! <3 :) :) :)”

Teddy is slow swiping the Twitter notification away, slower still pausing the show as he checks the text message he’d ignored earlier.

“If I did a liveshow would you be able to come watch?? I should have just let u stay over but I didn’t expect to start one…”

His pulse picks up speed.

“Hm…” he texts, a thoughtful Iron Man emoji following it. “I could pencil you in, maybe.”

“I never asked you what your username was btw. What have you been creeping under??”

“There’s no fun in telling :)”

Teddy looks up at  _ GoT _ still paused on his laptop, running his thumb along the hard plastic edges of his phone case. Knowing Billy now personally, something about watching him through the computer screen seems invasive, illicit.

He opens another tab.

“I’ll be there if u are,” he sends.

Billy’s changed into a massive, shapeless shirt splattered in old paint. Teddy knows his apartment is bigger than it looks on camera, knows the light washes the canvas in front of Billy paler than it actually is, knows Billy smells like acrylic paint and vetiver and oak moss, something light and what Teddy thinks is a bit otherworldly, what he thinks is something  _ special _ . Teddy knows lots of things, now, that no one else does. Not in this YouNow room. He’s giddy with  _ knowing _ as Billy grins, waving at the camera in his room that Teddy feels he could be in now; it’s real and Billy is real more tonight than either of them have been before.

“Today’s liveshow sponsored by avocado-two, the continued kindness — or obliviousness, yes, ShieldMeStevie — of my neighbor, and my entirely normal caffeine practices, regardless of what naysayers might lead you to believe,” he finishes, looking meaningfully into the camera.

Teddy drops his sandwich, covers his unbearably hot face with his hands.

_ Get it together, Altman. What are you, twelve? _

“Hello to you too, PunisherDaddy. I thought we got rid of you last time?” Billy pauses on screen, head cocking to the side as a slow smirk spreads on his face. “Unless —”

He leans close to the webcam on his laptop, close enough the little crinkles of mirth at the corners of his eyes are in blue, low quality relief. Teddy’s stomach clenches low and sweet as his phone lights up with a text.

“Are you saying that our chat earlier was just a clever ruse?”

“Unfortunately not me. Keep trying :)”

“Shit,” Billy mutters on camera, looking down onto his phone. “Alright. Well. I messed up those watercolors pretty badly last time, as we all saw — no, TyrionDeservedBetter, I haven't given it to my neighbor yet. I’m an asshole. I think you’ve been watching long enough to know that — so I’m using my regular acrylics today. I —”

Billy pauses, rucking a hand through his hair as he reads the messages coming in on the chat. Teddy feels wrong watching it.

“The gallery meeting went...good, MyAssguardian. Great, even,” he chuckles, a smile soft on his face. “Better than I thought it would be. I even made a non-internet...uhm, friend. Can you believe that?”

On the screen, JohnlockArmada says “sounds fake lmfao.”

Dr.Bae—nner writes “receipts or delete.” 

“I—” Billy looks red around the ears even in the sallow light as he pulls his canvas closer to him.

“Omfgggg you have a boyfriend already fukken trollop,” darlingxwidow sends.

“N—no!” Billy stumbles. “Let’s just — art. It’s time for art.”

Teddy watches Billy pointedly ignore the chat as he works on completing the sketch on his canvas. He can’t look away from it, though.

“I never thought this day would come.”

“Congrats rat.”

“Unrelatable. Unrealistic. Unstanning.”

“i want a selfie.”

“Fuck a selfie i want billy to paint a picture of them together”

“Omg @buckmebarnes the true romantic YES give us the FANSERVICE BILLY.”

Teddy picks his phone up, writes a text, deletes it, writes it again verbatim, before putting his phone down. 

“Guys, come on,” Billy groans when he looks up five minutes later.

Hardly able to believe himself, Teddy starts typing into the chat box on his screen.

“He’s private you guys let him live.”

“Gtfo.”

“Fake fan!”

“Are you even a stan if you aren’t interested in X-Filesing ur fave?”

“So anyway, what are good places to eat around here, New York people?” Billy says loudly, hardly looking up from his canvas. Teddy studies the line of his shoulders and back hunched over the canvas, the slope of his nose, the light from his laptop caught in his eyelashes. In the chat, most people are swapping conspiracy theories still.

_ X-filesing your fave.  _

Teddy opens a new tab, and he googles “billy kaplan.”

The  _ Ellen _ clips are the first results. Billy looks young when Teddy replays them, though it’s only been seven months since they aired. 

His YouTube and YouNow stations are next, then an erratically updated tumblr and a very, very old looking DeviantArt — Teddy bookmarks that one to tease him with later, he’s pretty sure that’s a  _ Naruto _ OC on the second page. The next links are news articles;  _ Buzzfeed _ and  _ People _ profiles after his first video went viral, a little piece on Tony Stark tweeting about Billy and Ellen doing Avengers paint-by-numbers as part of their segments. The other stuff comes up after page four.

“Watervliet High in Flames,” “Teen Boy Declared Dead After Tragic Fire,” “Local Boys Indicted for School Fire,” followed by several articles with titles a variation of this theme.

Teddy shouldn’t. This was actually invasive, more than watching Billy on camera. But it’s on the internet, he reasons, and something he could have read at any point before meeting Billy. Most of the people in that YouNow chat likely already knew themselves, as eager as they seemed to be for fodder about Billy’s personal life.

_ Personal _ life.

Teddy clicks the first link.

_ The Watervliet community struggles to regroup after the fire that consumed Watervliet High late yesterday morning. _

_ Students report that the blaze broke out midway through their first period course at roughly 9:45 am. The fire seemingly broke out near the school’s chemistry lab and officials claim was likely the result of a gas leak in this area. No less than sixty five of the school’s 600 enrolled students were taken to Lakeland Hospital for injuries of varying degrees. _

Teddy’s stomach gives a sick twist, cold certainty starting to pool heavy in his body. He owes it to Billy to read through the article now that he’s clicked on it, now that he’s sought it out. Billy couldn’t just click out and ignore what happened to him or to his brother, and it’s not fair for Teddy to try now that he’s nosed his way in this far.

_ Despite the statement from the school’s administration, several students reported to the  _ Tri-City Record _ potential student involvement in this tragedy. Two boys were allegedly spotted in this chemistry lab, behaving suspiciously, moments before the explosion. _

The rest of article is short and mostly speculation. The second threatens to bring up his dinner.

_ Thomas Abbot Kaplan, 17, has died from injuries sustained at the Watervliet High fire last week. His family, parents Jeff and Rebecca Kaplan, twin brother William Kaplan, and younger brother James Kaplan, have requested donations be made in lieu of flowers to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee ( _ [ _ www.jdc.org _ ](http://www.jdc.org) _ ). _

_ As of today, Kaplan’s death is the only one resulting from the tragic fire that consumed nearly half of Watervliet High’s campus and injured sixty-three other students. _

Teddy learns Tommy ran track and was accepted to Vassar on some ridiculously competitive biology scholarship. His chest is physically heavy when he clicks the third link.

_ The Watervliet Sheriff's Office, in coordination with other local and state officials, have announced today their plans to indict William Abel Kaplan, 17,  in the fire that destroyed Watervliet High, injuring sixty-three of its students and killing Thomas Kaplan, William’s twin brother, who Sheriff Eddie Brown says was also involved in the arson attempt. _

His phone is littered with messages when he looks down to it, dumbly.

“Did u fall asleep on me?”

“I hope you arent mad about them talking about us. Sort of us? Sort of you??”

“I wasn’t really thinking. If I made you mad I’m really sorry. I liked hanging out with you today, hope I didn’t mess up too badly.”

“Sooo, I’ll talk to you later, I hope? Sleep well, if that’s what youre doing :)”

Teddy puts the phone down with hands that shake.  _ Sleep _ , he thinks.  _ Right. _

* * *

“Not mad!! Just an old man,” Teddy texts him after lunch the next day. “You can’t trust me for anything after 7pm.”

Billy texts him back almost instantly, but Teddy doesn’t open it just yet.

* * *

Dinosaur Bar-B-Que is worth a lot, Teddy muses. But as he shoves a man across the counter separating the kitchen from the main space, patrons screaming and fleeing the warm dining room, he reasons takeout would have sufficed, just today. He’d come all the way down specifically to get away from his own problems, not to walk into another.

“You son of a  _ bitch _ ,” the man slurs, disoriented, fumbling his grip on his pistol as he rights himself.

“Don’t insult my mother,” Teddy frowns, hardly having to lean over the counter, sticky with spilled barbecue sauce and soda, to wrench the gun out of his hand.

The man swings to clock him in the jaw, but Teddy catches his fist with his own.

“Listen, man,” Teddy sighs, jerking his chin back to the man whose skull he’d introduced to the wall minutes prior, now a graceless heap underneath a table. “You see what I did to your friend, right? I’m letting you off easy. Sit down until the police come.”

“ _ Fuck _ you, fucking punk ass—”

Teddy  _ thunks _ the butt of the pistol to the man’s temple. When he slumps over the counter, Teddy slams his head once against it just for good measure. The man doesn’t move again.

Rolling the tension loose out of his shoulders, Teddy looks around the mess that used to be a restaurant. His stomach grumbles. 

“Uhm,” he calls out, “I — they’re out. It’s safe to come out if —anyone is still here?”

A small waitress with beautiful, curly hair dyed purple in the front crawls out behind a fallen table, her eyes wide under blue winged eyeliner. 

“Holy shit. Are you — are you like him too?”

“Uhm — what?”

“ _ Luke Cage _ , dumbass. You’re big as he is — shit, man, I think you may be a bit bigger. So can you like, can you lift a car or something? Your skin bulletproof too?”

_ Ah.  _ Luke Cage is in jail, but everyone in Harlem has Luke Cage stories so rich in detail and given so freely, often without prompting at all, that Teddy feels like he knows the man by proxy having just spent the morning passing through before his disastrous barbecue attempt. Every block up from 110th the stories are longer, more complex. Harlem acts like Luke Cage never left.

Teddy rubs the back of his neck. “Uhm, only those little smart cars. Sorry,” he jokes weakly.  “And I — don’t really want to find out about the other, so.”

Out front, police sirens wail. A willowy woman who radiates “take no shit” walks in the front door, badge aloft. Her hair is a long, swinging curtain down to her waist, her suit clearly well worn but cared for. Her thickly heeled shoes are louder than they should be as she stalks in.

“Alright, what happened here?”

Teddy shares a brief look with the waitress before clearing his throat.

“Uhm, hello. Yes. Everyone was just eating lunch and that guy,” Teddy points to the first man he’d knocked out, “saw this guy —” he points behind the counter, and another officer walks around to inspect it, gun raised, “and just jumped up and they started fighting.”

“Just from seeing each other?”

“They said something about that bust last week, Lluvy,” the waitress pipes up. 

“She’s right,” Lluvy’s partner says behind the counter. “This one’s a Cadre. I’ll bet my left nut that one’s Cartel.”

“Shit,” Lluvy hisses. “Alright. Okay. So they started this — who finished it?”

“I.” Teddy clears his throat. “I tried to separate them. I knocked that one out there and chased the other one behind the counter.”

Lluvy raises a well groomed eyebrow. Her eyelashes are long and thick around her massive brown eyes. She’s distractingly pretty.

“All by yourself?” She asks skeptically.

“I —” Teddy frowns. “It’s just two guys. They were so focused on each other they didn’t see me coming, it’s really no big deal.”

“Just two,” she repeats softly. Her partner comes around from behind the counter, dragging the unconscious Cadre in handcuffs. She doesn’t look away from Teddy when she speaks again, her steady gaze a weight that collects like an anchor in his gut.

“Luis, can you grab this one too?”

“Uh — do I have to, I don’t know. Sign something? Or can I go? I never got my lunch, so I’m a little hu—”

“You aren’t from Harlem, are you? I think I would remember seeing you.”

“Uhm. No.”

“And what brings you down here?”

“Ah — barbecue.”

“No barbecue in — what? Sutton Place? Turtle Bay?”

“Dinosaur has the best barbecue in New York,” Teddy tries to keep his tone mild and not drop his eyes to the floor. It sort of works. He just wanted to help, but he knows better. It always ends up like this. Especially now, after people know Luke Cage, he should have just —

Just what? Let them start a shootout in a packed restaurant? He couldn’t do that. Teddy couldn’t live with himself.

Lluvy cocks her head to the side thoughtfully, her hair tumbling over her shoulder like a waterfall. “You —”  

To their left, the Cartel member stumbles to their feet as Luis re-enters the restaurant, his gun finding a steady grip in his hand. 

Lluvy is on him quicker than Teddy can blink, pressing him to the wall. Luis joins her, wrenching his hands back to cuff them. 

“Hey, uhm.” Teddy turns to the waitress, who doesn’t even come up to his shoulder. “I can’t say I’m an expert, but what would the Cartel be doing in Harlem? I thought Frank Castle got rid of them, it was all over the news.”

“Well I’m no damn expert myself but I wouldn't stick around Midtown with the Punisher up my ass.”

Lluvy walks back over to them, frowning. “Alright. Both of you two are going to have to sign depositions. You —” she reaches in her packet and Teddy flinches reflexively, which only earns him a suspicious once over. “Here is my card. I will be calling you later. It would be in your best interest to pick up.”

Luis looks at him sympathetically as Teddy writes his statement in his best handwriting at one of the cleaner tables he could find. Lluvy, the waitress, and two cooks from the kitchen are talking quietly by the bar. Teddy is so hungry he thinks about how bad it would be to pick off one of the plates near him. If Luis wasn’t still at his shoulder, he’d probably do it.

“Lluvy has intimidated men bigger than you, don’t feel bad about it. She’s in a bad mood today.”

“Oh, I’m not — I just don’t want any trouble. I’m not used to...police,” he finishes lamely.

“Not used to police.”

“I just sign here, right?” He asks loudly, pointing his pen to the bottom line.

“Yep, that and your phone number.”

Teddy doesn’t give the restaurant a backwards glance as he all but sprints for the subway station on 137th. 

It’s always something Teddy can’t keep his nose out of, and something Teddy makes worse. If anyone is going to find a drug cartel in a barbecue restaurant, it’s Teddy. If anyone is gonna find out the person they’re moony-eyed for is an arsonist who got his brother killed, that’s gonna be Teddy too. 

He doesn’t pull his phone out until he’s halfway home. 

Everyone’s got baggage, Teddy knows that. He should know it, anyway. Billy has his own to deal with, and maybe it’s unfair to try and hook their wagons together on top of that, knowing how Teddy’s luck always turns out. But maybe, he reasons, it just means Billy has practice carrying that weight. Maybe he won’t be easy to spoil or ruin. 

Maybe Teddy should push his luck.

“So listen my lunch plans just went horrifically sideways. Police and everything. Are you hungry??”

He doesn’t get a text back even as he walks up to the noise and light of the street, but he doesn’t expect one, really. Teddy’s pride has never been an issue, so he texts again.

“I’ll bring it to you? Have you ever had Friedmans? They have chicken and waffles”

“Sure”

Teddy winces. That’s even less than he expected to work with.

“Are you ok”

There’s a little hope, at least. Teddy sends a little relieved emoji and a thumbs up. “Let me go grab the food and i’ll be over in 30?”

“If u pick sth i dont like we cant be friends.”

“Roger roger” he sends back, alongside a .gif of Steve Rogers himself smiling and waving from his chorus line days. 

Billy sends back a few heart-eyes emojis, and Teddy thinks maybe he can make this work, just for now. 

* * *

Billy is ruffled and peckish looking when he opens the door. He’s in a similar shirt to his last liveshow; it was green, once, and hangs tent-like to reveal the hollows of his collarbone, the tendons in his neck that roll under his skin like a little tide that sucks Teddy in with just a glance down past his barely stubbled chin.

“Well. Hi.”

“...Hey, can I just —” Teddy puts the bags of food on the little counter separating the kitchen area from the living room before even being invited in, really. Now that he’s decided to come clean he feels like he can’t do anything else until he gets it off his chest. 

“Look. I am an — asshole. I have been a jerk to you but I just…”

Billy is picking through the boxes of food like he isn’t listening. Teddy is probably an asshole, but he leans close, hip propped on the countertop and half looming over Billy as he tears the corner off of one of his waffles and pops it in his mouth. Billy stills very suddenly under the weight of his shadow, and Teddy can’t decide if that knot that twists in his chest is pleasure at seeing Billy being affected by his closeness or disgust at himself for using his body this way. 

Billy looks up at him with his mouth parted, his eyelashes soot fluttering above his soft, open expression. Waiting. 

Teddy has to make himself lean back. 

“I wasn’t trying to ghost you. I really li— I just did something I felt guilty about and I didn’t know how to bring it up.”

Teddy is cracking the knuckles on his hands, trying to breathe evenly lest he loses control and starts changing colors. That would really, actually make it worse. 

“...What are you talking about?” Billy asks, heavy creases in his brow. 

“I — was avoiding you. But it’s because I...googled you.”

Billy’s eyebrows raise incredulously even as he takes a piece of chicken between his hands. He leans back and away from Teddy like he is finally, rightfully angry. 

“What did you find? My old DeviantArt? That’s embarrassing but not, like, that big of a deal for you to blow me off like you did. I thought —”

“I saw about the fire. About your brother. I read about Tommy.”

Billy drops the food in his hands.

 


	5. 05.

_**05.** _

Kate wakes up swinging.

Tommy catches her fist, clucking his tongue in a way embarrassingly reminiscent of his mother. Because  _ of course _ she would. Of course. He catches the other when it swings up to meet the first, rolling his eyes.

“Princess —”

Kate tries to jackknife up off the bed, legs flailing to tangle in his bedsheets, which only gets her moving more furiously.

Tommy huffs, swinging a leg over her and sitting down with his full weight, her wrists still caught in his hands.

“Kate. Katie. It’s me — you’re with me, wake up. Quit —  _ ouch _ , don’t fucking  _ bite me _ , you little shit — it’s Tommy! Stop!”

Her thrashing is slow to cease, and when she finally blinks up at him with any coherency, bleary eyed and panting heavily, the tension bleeds out of her body underneath him like a stopper has been pulled.

“ _ Shit _ — Tommy I...I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Tommy looks her over while she’s still enough to let him; the mussed nest of her straw blonde hair, high, wide cheeks flushed with sleep, a nasty yellow bruise forming on her delicate, square jaw. There’s dried blood flaking her skin where he didn’t clean it off well enough across her chest and even up to her neck, her left arm a sick blue bruise from shoulder to elbow. He can see it swollen puffy around the wound on her bicep where the gauze he’d taped over it had fallen off while she slept. He knows the knobs of her knees are twin scraped bruises, her right ankle swollen with a sprain nearly the same purple color as what’s on her pedicured toes.

“You’re a hot ass mess, Miss Bishop.”

She rolls her eyes.

“Don’t try and sweet talk me now that I’m already in your bed, Tommy.”

“That’s the full Manager’s Special experience,” he teases, but he doesn’t rise, her sleep warm body all dense muscle between the frame of his thighs. He waits for her eyes to find him before he speaks again. “What happened to you, Katie-Kate?”

“...What time is it?”

“Nope. Nu-uh. Don’t start. You tell me why I had to play unsexy nurse with you last night.”

“Tommy,” she whispers, her voice all quiet urgency that sets his teeth on edge, the need to run hot and quick under his skin. “What time is it, please?”

He’d been playing Rolling Sky before she woke and makes a show of looking pointedly to the phone next to her shoulder, backlit with his wallpaper of their old Maine Coon Toby, who died a year before Tommy himself did.

“Quarter past nine.”

“Oh. Good. Good.”

He clears his throat, looking down expectantly.

“I...can’t breathe. Get off me and I’ll tell you, okay?”

He squeezes at her slim hips with his thighs. “One hundred and sixty pounds of pure muscle, sweetheart,” he croons, grinning when a little smile flickers to life on her face. It’s enough to convince him to roll off, but he isn’t a total dumbass, he’s been tricked by her before. He wraps an arm around her waist to pull her close, tucking her under his chin. It wouldn’t do her any good to try and run today of all days, but if Tommy’s being fair only part of it is a cage. He nuzzles the crown of her hair while he has her like this, brushes his lips against the shell of her ear, and the fact she doesn’t grumble or shift underneath the attention and pretend she doesn’t like it is a sign to how bad her night was.

“I got in a fight.”

Tommy nips at her ear. “I’d hoped you didn’t do this to yourself.”

Kate’s muscles get a bit looser underneath him. Maybe he’ll offer to rub her back or something before she leaves — she’ll likely turn him down, as she always does whenever they get too close to being honest. When it stops being complicated or secretive, and she allows herself something she wants. 

“I...went to Bed-Stuy looking for someone.”

“What? A delivery place they wouldn’t take to your bougie ass apartment?”

“You’ve never been to my apartment, Tommy, how would you know?” She huffs, the start of the wall coming back between them. He can’t help but bristle.

“Of course, princess. You’re right. As usual.”

“I don’t —” Kate tries to wiggle a bit more space between their bodies. It only grinds her rear against him, and he laughs a little meanly.

“Don’t try to distract me now that you’re getting to the good part.”

Kate  _ tsk _ s, loose again now that he’s been enough of a tool she’s sure they’ve fully ventured past tenderness. Her rough hand is a cage when she finds his own to squeeze, her thumb brushing each of his knuckles in turn.

“I don’t really want to tell you but...I don’t think they followed me here, but if they did —”

“What.”

“I knocked him out, I checked to make sure he didn’t follow me but…okay. Let me start over.”

Kate wiggles to turn around to face him, wincing a bit as she tries to maneuver around her injured arm. Her other hand comes to rest tentatively on Tommy’s hip. He does not sigh into the touch as her thumb starts to make sweeping arcs on the skin taut over his hipbone.

“Now who’s distracting who?” She mutters, looking meaningfully down to his bare chest and back up to his face. He gives her waist a little squeeze, keeping his face impassive, and she clears her throat.

“Listen. You know how the papers are all saying that Frank Castle is on some new rampage?”

“That’s what serial killers tend to do,” he says, voice tight. If she’s starting with Frank Castle, it couldn’t end up anywhere good. “How did you end up going toe to toe with the Punisher?”

“I didn’t! I didn’t. Because some of the people they’re saying he killed, he didn’t actually do it. I was looking for the one who did.”

Her eyes are bloodshot and puffy but earnest as he looks down at her, aghast.

“...Kate. Be serious.”

“I  _ am _ !”

“How would you even know that, Kate?”

“I saw one of the pictures in the  _ Bulletin _ and it didn’t look right. It wasn’t a bullet wound — it looked like, uhm. Like an arrow.”

Tommy raises an incredulous brow and Kate stops tracing the little nonsense patterns on his hip, staring resolutely at his chest. He grabs her chin and forces him to look back up at him.

“You’re gonna have to explain that one to me.”

“I was on the archery team at school, okay? And —”

“And your preppy boarding school turned you into Daryl Dixon?”

“Tommy,  _ please _ .  I’m — really trying.” She takes a deep breath, he tries to give her the space to do so. “For your plebeian information, lots of olympic athletes train in ‘preppy boarding schools’ just like mine, that’s where all the good coaches go since they can make the most money.  _ Regardless _ , I know what arrow-wounds look like, and Frank Castle isn’t a bowman.”

“Is there a real reason you think that?”

Hurt flashes across her face before she reigns it in, chin jutted out.

“I just told you the real reason, Shepherd.”

“Even if you think the entry wound looks funny from whatever pixelated crime scene photo you found, who’s to say Frank Castle isn’t using a bow or a knife or a rusty spork or anything else?” He stops himself, brushes hair out of her face and tucks it behind her ear. “Actually, yes. Everyone knows what Frank Castle looks like, he’s conspicuous enough without a — without a bow....” 

Kate looks up at him smugly.

“Which is why he wouldn’t use one. Guns are easier to conceal. Like I was  _ saying. _ This is someone  _ else _ .”

“Alright, presume it is actually not a bullet wound. Why not just, I don’t know, tell the police?”

“Because I think they want it to be the Punisher.”

Tommy groans, buries his face into her neck and listens to the dry rasp of his stubble on her skin. She doesn’t flinch away from it at all, to her credit. She wouldn’t show him her discomfort anyway, even if she felt it. 

“Bishop, come on. A conspiracy?”

“No, you come on! After  _ everything _ with Fisk and then with the Stokes in Harlem — you think the police are impartial? You think they’re perfect? Just think about it, Tommy. Just — try. There’s vigilantes and gang wars and  _ aliens _ . For appearances sake, just think about how it would look if we had another serial killer on top of that.”

Tommy can’t say anything. Kate keeps going, like she would even if he did.

“And this — this guy, he’s counting on that. He’s taking advantage of that. I — I don’t know why, yet. For what. But I know he’s doing it.”

“And you,” he interrupts her quietly, “ _ you _ are the one who has to find him?”

“I mean. I did,” she murmurs, just as quiet and nuzzling into the hollow at the base of Tommy’s throat. That freely-given affection is another bad sign.

“How did you manage that?”

“...I can’t really say —”

“ _ Bishop _ . I didn’t ask you a single goddamn question last night when you showed up, out of the blue and beaten to  _ shit _ , at my house. You told me you could have lead this guy here — that’s why you came, right? You didn’t want to risk leading them to that nice apartment of yours.” 

The more he talks the angrier he gets. His fingers dig into the swell of her hip. She takes it without complaint, but she really owes him that. 

“Because I’m  _ expendable _ to you, oh my god —”

“You aren’t. Tommy — listen, please.”

“I’ll listen when you tell me the  _ truth. _ It is the  _ least _ you owe me!”

“Okay,” she whispers softly, and kisses once, twice, three times down the line of his collarbone up to where it sweeps to meet his shoulder.  _ Yes _ , he thinks,  _ this is going to get much worse. _

“I didn’t want to be alone. I was scared and you’re the only one I thought I could trust with this. With — knowing how stupid I was. That I...messed up. I’m not perfect, but you never ask me to be — you’ve never asked me to be, so I thought...I wouldn’t eat too much crow, I guess. But I don’t — think about you like that. You know I don’t.”

Tommy thinks maybe that’s about half true. The third time Kate stayed after a purchase, they’d busted out the tequila she’d brought back from her dad’s wedding in Punta Cana after going through a bowl each and she’d loosened up enough to allow herself to cuddle into Tommy’s chest and murmur mostly nonsense into his skin about not being a dumb rich girl or some such other shit Tommy half forgets in favor of the memories that came after; skin on skin and the only time she’d asked — even allowed herself — for more than a hand through the snarl of his hair, or one of his pressed low on her back for a few moments too long. She’d let herself sit on his lap, legs tight around his middle, licking a warm trail up his neck and guiding his hands to the weight of her breasts, her own reaching in the waistband of his pants while giving a litany of graphic promises and reasons why he should stop trying to pry her off of him, drunk or no. 

But you can’t bullshit a bullshitter, and Tommy knows some of it is for his benefit. 

“And I know,” she continues, bringing their bodies closer together, one of her knees wiggling between his legs, “that I am — selfish and spoiled and maybe I shouldn’t have...I know I shouldn’t have come but. I didn’t want to be alone.”

Her toes are little blocks of ice brushing his shin. Tommy won’t give her a pat on the back for a half truth, or a way out of her own guilt. Eventually, she must realize that. She speaks very carefully, after.

“I laid out where all of the hits were and saw that there hadn’t been any in Bed-Stuy; they were all over Manhattan and even some into Brooklyn but it was like there was this wall around Bed-Stuy and I knew. You don’t shit where you eat, you know?”

Tommy licks his lips. They might come here, whoever they are. He should know.

“So you went.”

“So I went. And I was taking pictures of all the buildings for my — my files,” she falters, clearing her throat.

“Your  _ what _ —?”

“Tall ones, corner apartments, roof access. Places a sniper would go. Places…places I would go. And then this man came up — this weirdo. He knew what I was doing. He followed me back and caught up with me in the Flatiron District.”

“And now he knows what you look like and he knows you’re onto him. Great, Kate. That’s just fucking grand. Are you convinced to go to the police now?”

“I can’t, Tommy.”

Tommy grabs a fistful of her hair, tilts her head up to look him in the eye.

“Yes, you can.”

“Tommy, he would find me.”

“It sounds like he already  _ has _ .”

His phone starts to ring.

“ _ Fuck _ ,” he groans. “Don’t run. We aren’t done and I would catch you,” he tells her firmly as he rolls over to grab at it.

_ Lisa.  _ Well goody-gumdrops.

Tommy looks at Kate, starting to poke around her own injuries, before rising from the bed and walking to his kitchen.

“What is it?” He grinds out in lieu of a greeting.

“Hello to you too, sweet-cheeks. Gonna need you to swing by this afternoon —”

“Fuck  _ off _ with that bullshit —”

“Unless you want me to come by yours?”

“...No.”

“You wound me, babe.”

“I’ll come by when I can.”

“You’ll come by no earlier than twelve, no later than three,” she corrects him crisply.

Sunlight streams warm mid-morning in his dirty kitchen. He ends the call and thinks that he’s left his life and started anew once before, created something from less than nothing; something from a purposeful absence. He could run again.

Kate hobbles into the doorway and props against it. She’s thrown on one of his shirts, worn thin around the collar and tight around the swell of her hips and chest, her muscled back and shoulders. He can see through it with the bright light in the kitchen, see the fine hairs on her bare thighs stretching smooth and taut out from her plain black underwear.

“I’ll order us breakfast? Anything you want. It can be here in ten minutes.”

Tommy hands her his phone wordlessly before heading to the bathroom for a shower. 

Running is what he does best, anyway.

* * *

Lisa is small and compact and unmuscled and scary as any of the bulky, hulking goons that are stationed throughout his building.

“I know I say this every time you pull my leash and drag my happy ass out to this funny farm, but your guard dogs aren’t discreet.”

“And as I tell you every time I get to look at your beautiful bone structure and tight ass, these dogs aren’t mine to control. Even I have a boss or two.”

Tommy grits his teeth through the twin kisses Lisa presses noisily to his cheeks as he enters the warehouse proper. 

“What’s the emergency, Lisa?”

“It’s an  _ opportunity, _ baby.”

He’s learned better than to show his irritation at the pet names, the cooing, the petting — like they were still in Watervliet, still skipping gym or second period to go neck in a closet somewhere — but sometimes he wants to say “fuck it” and bite her head off like he used to. If she wanted to have it like nothing’s changed between them, she should accept it as it used to be; good, bad, and indifferent.

It was foreplay, back then. As close as two fumbling teenagers could get to that, anyway. But, really, Tommy supposes it’s still foreplay of a sort now. 

Lisa takes her long, ash brown hair and braids it absently in a thick rope over her shoulder so her round, freckled face shines in the spare warehouse light as she walks. She’s pretty, Tommy wouldn’t ever take that away from her, and she doesn’t look at all like a drug dealer. A capital “D” Drug Dealer, at that. Her dimples come into sweet relief as she whistles lowly to herself. He could fit his thumb in there, if he wanted. He used to like to, anyway.

“I’ve turned down ‘opportunities’ before, Lisa. I’m good with what I have now. I don’t need any more of your funny business.”

“You don’t even know what it is,” she points out. Her voice is light, but her eyes are sharp. His guts start to twist, tangling around each other. This matters to her, whatever it is; she’s got something riding on it.

“Lisa,” he groans, rucking a hand through his hair. “When I came to the city, I told you I would sell your shit with conditions. I mule your pills to the clinics you say, the apartments I don’t want to know about. I keep less than half of the MJ cash from what I sell myself, and that’s fine. But I don’t do your goddamn —”

Lisa clamps one of her small, unnervingly soft hands over his mouth.

“Shut  _ up _ , you dumbass,” she hisses.

He bites her palm, glaring daggers. “What’s your fucking problem?”

“Oh, you know. Just my desire to keep you alive and all that bullshit that causes me nothing but trouble,” she shoots back furiously, smoothing her hands over her hair, the front of her grey shirt.

“I like you much better when you aren’t pretending like you want to fuck me.”

“Who says I’m pretending?” She grabs his arm and guides him back to an office overlooking the big workspace on the building’s first floor. “Now shut up so I can keep that dream alive.”

She shuts the door behind them. There’s a big window staring out onto the floor, so the guards have an uninterrupted line of sight even with the flimsy illusion of privacy.

“It’s one of the last good memories I have before moving to the city,” Lisa grins after a moment’s pause. If Tommy’s being fair or honest, it’s one of his last, too.

He’s worked double shifts at the ice cream shop down from Lisa’s dance studio for two weeks to afford the dinner — she worked the front desk at the studio after school, had borrowed one of the costumes to wear that night, one of her freckled, milky shoulders bare, the shiny blue fabric thick and a bit scratchy under Tommy’s hands —

“From high school sweethearts to drug dealers, how can you not look back fondly?” He asks drily instead, because he isn’t fair or honest or even really interested in feeling good today, even in memory. Maybe Kate has rubbed off on him in that regard. Then again, he’s always been able to find someone else to pin his shit on.

Billy could attest to that.

“Lisa, I’m tired. If we really were friends before —” 

She takes a step back when he says it, face all confused hurt.

“— then please just tell me what you want so I can tell you no and go home.”

“...Did you ever think,” she murmurs, “that might hurt my feelings, Tommy?”

“I wasn’t aware you had any,” he says tightly, voice like a plucked string.

Lisa slams her hands on the desk loud enough that several of the thugs outside turn towards the office, looking twitchy.

“You have always been such a spoiled-ass  _ brat _ , Tommy Kaplan. You find me, out of the blue, faking your  _ goddamn  _ death, asking for  _ help _ after the way you treated me — and I give you the easiest, most pussified jobs, because  _ I’m _ some  _ asshole _ , and you still find shit to complain about! I would never let any of my other sellers talk to me like how you do —”

“Don’t guilt trip me to  _ mule heroin _ or  _ coke _ or whatever the fuck it is you do because I dumped you before prom!”

He forgets how fast she is, sometimes, and mostly because he doesn’t like to think about it. Her palm stings red on his cheek before he has the thought to step back.

“You don’t have a  _ choice _ ,” Lisa growls.

“Good luck catching me to make good on that. I’m still faster than you, no matter what poison they’ve been pumping you full of,” he spits, looking meaningfully to the scarred crook of her elbow.

Lisa pulls open the desk drawer like she has half a mind to rip it off its tracks, and doesn’t take his bait. She grabs a fistful of papers seemingly at random before throwing them on the table.

“Think the  _ fuck _ again,” she snarls.

Jimmy. Billy. Mom and Dad. Even his cousin Al in Newark. At soccer, at his mom’s practice, the hospital where his dad is all done up in his surgical scrubs. One of Billy —

Of Billy —

Billy, in front of Cupla Joe’s, a big blonde boy by his side. Billy, in the city. Billy, in Hell’s Kitchen. Billy, close. His ears ring a high pitched whine he can’t shake.

Tommy has Lisa pinned to the wall, one elbow digging unforgivingly into her windpipe, faster than he can think about it.

Her hair smells like the same vanilla mint shampoo she’s always used when he leans in close to speak to her ear. It turns his stomach sour. His stutter is always worse when he is upset like this, so it is several long breaths that feel like years in his lungs before he speaks, careful to give Lisa nothing to take for herself and turn against him.

“I will kill you, Lisa. It won’t be anything to me; anything but a joy to be rid of you. I’ll be gone before they even know I’m there. You know I can. You’ve seen me do it. And so help me I will flay you open and let the flies suck the  _ rot _ out of your skull if you touch them.”

“I’m not the one you need to worry about, you piece of shit,” she chokes out. He digs his elbow in deeper, until her face starts purpling.

“Quit trying to put the blame on someone else, Lisa. God, you always do this —”

“You are a  _ delusional fucking asshole _ , you know I don’t run this by myself. I’m on my own leash, too.”

She wrenches herself free, reaches for a separate drawer and pulls out a large plastic bag full of little paper packets. Her voice is pulpy, raw hoarseness when she speaks, and she doesn’t look at him at all. He sees her hazel eyes shine wetly, regardless.

“You’ve got a new responsibility, Tommy. You can’t say no. You can’t weasel your way out no matter how good you are.”

“You don’t know how good I am,” Tommy says evenly, smoothing his hair back. “And I do say no. Tell your boss that.”

* * *

“Thanks for letting me crash. & everything else. I am sorry. Really. You’re good to me, Shepherd. xo”

Kate’s text unfurls some of the tension in his neck and shoulders as he stalks home. After Lisa, this residual, lighter anger with Kate feels like a relief when he remembers it. She sends another message as soon as he decides to not answer.

“I had to get home but I promise I will call later and explain better. Or if you want to see the bougie ass apartment in person…”

Tommy saves the address that follows before slipping the phone back in his pocket. He is  _ weak _ . Billy always said he got pussy-whipped too easy, even before Lisa. 

Billy.

“Fuck,” he grinds out, just to get it out of him.

He’s got a few hours before his next appointment, because he is still an asshole, and still doing what Lisa wants, somehow, and Tommy hasn’t tried to beat his record to Quebec and back in a few months.

It’s not what he really wants, but it’s enough to wear out that itch under his skin for now.

So he runs.

* * *

Tommy resolutely doesn’t dwell on what kind of business IGH does. He’d think it was shady even if he didn’t make his deliveries to an empty office building off of one of the docks Tommy was mostly sure the yakuza owned.

“Does this include the additional items I asked for?”

Tommy shrugs, keeping a more than casual distance between himself and Kozlov. He projects military toughness from his wiry body like a beacon; if anyone could see through the back of their heads, Tommy reckons it would be this uptight bastard. He acts like he’s Tommy’s disappointed grandpa or uncle whenever Tommy is forced to look at Kozlov’s haggard mug, which is bullshit for many reasons, none the least of which include the fact he is very literally buying drugs from Tommy whenever they have to meet. If anyone has a right to be disappointed in Tommy’s life choices, Kozlov isn’t one of them.

“I just do deliveries. If you have any issues with contents you need to call Lisa.”

Kozlov clucks his tongue.

“You take the money and think you aren’t responsible for the contents?”

“Basically.”

“That’s dishonorable, son.”

If Tommy didn’t think Kozlov would turn his skin inside out or something for snapping back, he’d probably tell him to cut the cliche, old military commander schtick, especially considering he was purchasing illegal drugs. As it is, Tommy is tired and cranky and not ready for another argument today.

“Dishonor or no, it is what it is.”

There’s a knock on the door behind them, and Tommy and Kozlov, for once, seem to have the same opinion on something. There has never been anyone else at a delivery before. Tommy’s body is taut as a pulled string as he turns to the noise.

“Get in if you’re coming in,” Kozlov snaps.

A tall, broad, and objectively beautiful man steps through the door. The blueish overhead light reflects off his shaved head and the piercings at his ears — for one second Tommy thinks Luke Cage has crashed their party.

And wouldn’t that have been a shit-show to end his day with.

“Eli,” Kozlov nods. “You’re early. You can go make your deliveries once I’m done going through the package.”

“Yes, sir.” Eli pauses by the door before sticking his hand out. Tommy takes it dumbly, before he can really think it over. “Eli Bradley.”

“Oh. Uh. Tommy Shepherd. Good to meet you, man.”

“I’m short,” Kozlov frowns. 

Tommy scrubs a hand over his face. He just wants to get out of here.

“Alright. I can talk to Lisa, bring whatever it is tomorrow.”

“How long have you been doing business with me, Tommy?”

He bites back a groan. 

“Long enough that we both know I hate rhetorical questions as much as you seem to love them, you senile son of —”

“And seven months,” Kozlov interrupts pointedly, “is long enough for you to know that the reds and blues have to be  _ evenly matched _ . There is no ‘coming back tomorrow.’”

“I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m doing what I can.”

“You are a lazy coward,” Kozlov says plainly. “Eli, you will accompany Tommy back to get the remaining part of my purchase. I won’t give you any money until I have the rest of it. Eli will help you actually, satisfactorily complete a task for once in your life.”

Tommy turns wordlessly on his heel before he makes another dumb decision he will regret in the morning, marching outside and breathing in the nearly wet, clean feeling night air while he tries to keep his feet firm on the ground. 

Not in front of witnesses, not where they can see —

Eli’s careful, light steps follow behind him. Unfortunately, so does his voice.

“...Kozlov is a hardass.”

Tommy tells himself that Eli is probably the one who needs some kindness, if he has to deal with Commander Asshole every day. It sounds like his mom, a bit, and it doesn’t really help him want to be nicer.

“Kozlov isn’t the first bastard I’ve dealt with. I’ve just...bad day,” Tommy grunts. “Let’s just get this over with.”

He lets Eli match pace with him for several steps until they are at the mouth of the street, the sallow lightposts brief ellipses punctuating the velvet, heavy dark.

_ Get your shit together, Shepherd. _

Eli clears his throat. “Is it far? I can drive. I parked a block away from here.”

“Nah. Come on.”

The warehouse is actually a thirty minute walk away at best, but it doesn’t matter. He won’t be making it there anyway — Eli could walk to Timbuktu for all Tommy cares.

“So you’re his mule? Can I deal with you from now on then?”

“I...am doing him a favor. I owe him a lot.”

“Oh. Okay. Whatever that means.”

“I wouldn’t do this — drugs, whatever — if I didn’t owe him. I don’t do...whatever shit you push.”

Tommy looks at him incredulously. 

“And what do you know about what I push?”

“I know the people you work for.”

“And you know they cook up whatever illegal, science fair shit for  _ your _ asshole boss. Are you really going to start this with me? On what planet are you the morality police?”

“That science fair  _ shit _ saves people’s lives.”

Tommy comes to a stop. Eli falters to one warily himself, cautious even if his chin is jutted out like he’s expecting a fight.

Self-righteous asshole. 

“You know. I just...am out of fucks. I’m out. I don’t give a shit. I don’t usually do this in front of people. But. It’s been a bad day, like I said.” He claps his hands together. “So, Eli. You can fuck right off. You and your shithead boss. Good luck finding the place, except I really don’t care.”

Tommy runs, not for the first time today. He hardly hears Eli’s shocked sputtering as he heads towards Tribeca.

* * *

“You owe me a favor,” he pants in lieu of a greeting. He’d made twenty three laps of this shitty island before feeling calm and settled enough in his skin to show up on this doorstep. “If we’re being honest — I know, shocker — you owe me  _ many favors _ .”

Kate is wearing low slung yoga pants that look needlessly expensive, her hair all piled on her head, the swanlike lines of her neck and collarbone exposed and begging for his hand.

“Who is that?” Comes a liltingly accented voice behind her. A guy’s voice.

Of course. He looks at her, brows raised. 

“Nevermind, then. I see you’re busy,” he says woodenly, angry at himself for sounding wounded.

“Don’t be a dick, Sammy’s my roommate. A very disinterested in girls one,” she huffs, cheeks red. “Don’t just stand outside, get in here, come on. You look like shit.”

A lanky man a few inches taller than Tommy sits up from where he’d sprawled on the couch. The leggings he’s got on are ones Tommy is absolutely certain he’s seen Kate in before. They barely reach halfway down his shin. 

“Why hello there,” he smiles, green eyes very bright. Tommy raises an eyebrow, looking him up and down. His hair is half plaited back from his face, and his jaw is stubbled evenly in shadow. He looks up at Tommy with undeniable interest that has Tommy standing straighter under the scrutiny.

“Hello to you, too.”

“Tommy, this is Samuel. Sammy, this is Tommy.”

“Samuel is thrilled,” Sammy grins cheekily. “Are you her secret boyfriend?”

“Sammy,” Kate huffs.

“I don’t think so,” Tommy says lightly, shrugging. 

“So you’re single?” He presses. Tommy feels his own grin stretch impossibly wide as Kate shoves Sammy’s shoulder, brow furrowed.

“Sammy —”

“Might be.”

“Oh, my god. Good  _ night _ , Sammy,” Kate grinds through her teeth, grabbing Tommy’s arm and guiding him back to her room, shutting the door behind her with a not-gentle click.

“...Jealous?” Tommy smirks as he watches Kate gather up some dirty laundry strewn on her floor and straighten the downy white comforter on her unmade bed. “Don’t try to clean up just for little low class me.”

“Don’t be a smug asshole.”

“I’m sorry, have we met?”

Kate plops down into her nest of million thread count sheets, leaning back on her elbows and eyeing him shrewdly.

“What brought you here so soon, Tommy? You usually play hard to get.”

He crashes face first into the mattress beside her. Her room smells like lilacs or some shit, and he’s  _ weak _ enjoying the smell of it on her bed pressed close to his face. 

“You’re projecting, sweetheart.”

“Tommy, come on.”

He turns his head to look at her, then slowly reaches up to wrap an arm around her waist.

“Maybe there isn’t a reason.”

Kate licks at her lips, trains her eyes on the ceiling.

“Since when do we do booty calls?”

Tommy rises, straddles her middle. One of his hands dares to cup her face before releasing her hair from its bun.

“Since when do we do anything?”

“Tommy, we don’t for a reason,” she sighs, but she arches her neck when she says it. 

“For a dumb reason,” he murmurs before kissing a trail up the side of her throat. “That only  _ you _ seem to be concerned about.” 

Her breath hitches when he reaches the soft spot behind her ear. 

“I have had a very bad day,” he continues, his hands stroking at her sides. “You had a rough night. I don’t see the problem. Maybe we’ve earned it.”

Kate’s hands are slow reaching to unzip the hoodie he wore for all his deliveries. She shucks it off and throws it into a corner of her room.

“I could alphabetize them,” she murmurs, slipping her rough hands up the hem of his shirt, pressing them flat to his navel. One reaches up to brush against a nipple, and he hisses with the promise of the touch.

“Do me a favor and don’t. You’re such a mood killer, Katie-Kate, what the fuck.” He’s smiling as he says it, though, he doesn’t mean a word. 

Kate yanks his shirt off as much as she’s able, and they’re both laughing when he finishes shucking it off. He wiggles down to roll her pants off and mouths up between her legs — the curve of her knee up to the weighty muscle of her thigh, smooth and warm and sweet smelling, satiny under his tongue. 

_ God _ . 

“You better be going somewhere with this,” Kate warns him. He only looks up to wink at her before dragging her panties down with his teeth. Trying to, anyway.

“You are lame as  _ fuck _ , Tommy Shepherd. That shit only works in porn. Take them off with your hands like a real boy.”

“Bossy,” he mutters, but he complies like he’s prone to do. Maybe she tries to snark back at him, but he busies himself at the wet line of her cunt eagerly enough he misses it. Lucky him.

And he’s a sentimental piece of shit but Kate might not let him do this again, so he’s slow even when he wants to drive into her, make her carry some of the weight of his day. Careful. Thorough. It feels like he’s not moving at all, given his usual speed of inertia. Maybe he’s a glutton for punishment and delayed gratification, though, because each of his absent grinds against the bed while he laps at her is a delicious, budding ache swelling in his groin. 

Kate babbles the entire time, and Tommy is such a fucking tool but he’s smiling and happy to be half-listening to it until her body goes taut above him, her legs an unforgiving squeeze around his head where they’re slung over his shoulders. 

When she releases him his ears ring and he feels light-headed, nearly losing his balance on his numb elbows.

“Fuck. Fuck.  _ Fuck _ you Tommy,” she pants.

He pinches the crease where her rear curves to meet her thigh and she squeals, wiggling and squirming away from him. 

“I’m sorry, what did you think I was trying to do just there?”

Kate kicks his shoulder.

“Flip over, I like to be on top.”

“Anything you say, princess.” 

He means it.

* * *

There is running, Tommy is familiar with that. Tommy thinks more often than not it is the only thing he knows for sure, the only verifiable truth in the world.

There is running, and there is  _ bolting _ . 

He wakes at 4:30 in the morning, face buried between Kate’s breasts, his hand asleep under the swell of her back, tender bruises of her swollen mouth’s making peppering his shoulders, his chest, the juncture of his ear and neck. 

Her face is open in sleep, but unlike last time they shared a bed Kate is very nearly smiling, now, her brow smooth and flawless as ceramic, her upper lip fuller than the one underneath, barely bitten between her teeth.

Tommy’s chest gives a heaving squeeze.

_ Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. _

He bolts.


	6. 06.

_**06.** _

Kate wakes up meaner than a hornet’s nest, like she already knows Tommy is gone.

Her underwear feels grimy as she yanks them on from where she finds them at the foot of the bed, and her tank top (hidden under her desk chair) hugs itchy and tight against her hypersensitive skin. Everything feels like the knob’s been turned all the way up; the slamming of her door as she throws it open shatters the brittle line of her spine.

“Where is he?” She demands, hands on her hips.

Samuel nearly drops the bowl of cereal he’s walking back into the den from the kitchen, shirtless and sleep tousled. 

“Half your fucking dick is hanging out of your underwear,” she snaps. “Fix yourself.”

“...You know,” Samuel begins slowly, sitting down on their couch and decidedly not stuffing his genitals into his Calvin’s, “most people are in  _ better _ moods after they get laid.”

Kate watches disgustedly as he slurps down a noisy spoonful of Fruity Pebbles.

“Some people are even happy,” he continues around his mouthful.

“Swallow first, act like you have some home training,” she scolds him, crossing her arms over her chest.

“If  _ I _ had just gotten on  _ my _ back for that fine man, I think I would be  _ elated _ . He looks like a real lover, you know? A man who takes his time —”

“Next time you can have him, then,” Kate hisses, turning on her heel to march back to her room.

“And you know I can see your tits literally twenty-four seven, right? You hardly ever even wear a bra, Miss Free the Fucking Nipple, so you can deal with —”

Kate slams her bedroom door so hard she hears several of their pictures in the other room shatter to the floor.

“Sweet Christ, woman!”

Kate ignores Samuel’s muffled protest as she grabs her phone from the nightstand and stalks to her bathroom.

“You are dead to me, Tommy Shepherd. This is exactly why I didn’t fuck your lame ass before, you emotionally stunted piece of shit. If you come by my BOUGIE ASS apartment again I will show u EXACTLY what they taught me to do with an arrow at my BOUGIE ASS boarding school.”

Her thumbs hurt a little when she hits send, but she sends another six messages that are each just seven rows of the shit emoji anyway. Her bath is halfway full and she’s pouring in some pink epsom salts when her phone dings.

“TF are you on about, you crazy woman??? Why does everything have to be so goddamn dramatic with you all the time?”

It’s all she can do to not call Tommy just to scream into the line. She settles for another text, because she can’t stop herself.

“The sex wasn’t good enough for me to just forgive you for leaving like I’m some random ass you hit when you’re feeling the man-blues.”

Tommy calls when she’s put on her Iron Maiden cello covers and is sinking into her tub. She tells her phone to fuck off where it’s buzzing on her counter, but it rings twice more. She ignores it.

Kate doesn’t emerge until her skin is numb, pink rubber, though her nerves are no better for it. Her hands shake as she braids her wet hair away from her face, and she stabs herself in the eye with her mascara wand almost as soon as she’s sat at her vanity.

“Shit,” she mutters, reaching for the Q-Tips under her sink. 

She stabs herself in the eye with the cotton bud trying to clean the mascara mess.

“ _ Argh _ !”

From behind her, Samuel knocks on her door the exact moment her phone dings again.

“ _ Seriously _ ?!”

“...I’m really hoping you’re PMS-ing, Katie,” Samuel pouts as he walks into her bathroom, holding a box in his hands.

“I really can’t feel guilty right now, I hope you aren’t expecting me to apologize.”

“Well whenever you get around to it, why don’t you just let me know?” Samuel snaps, dropping the box on her sink counter and stomping out of her room.

Kate might feel some hot guilt curl in her belly as she watches his back retreat in her vanity mirror, but she shoves it down to finish her face. She focuses on the patting and blending and the motions of getting ready and forgets about the box until she has to reach behind her for a lip liner. 

What had her last QVC binge been?  Hand towels or something? Those were on sale a few weeks ago.

The phone dings again. She picks it up with an irritable huff as her other hand reaches for the box. It’s brown and smaller than a shoebox — maybe half the size, and light as air. Nothing rattles inside it when she drags it into her lap. 

She’d ordered a new Kindle model, but there’s no way it’s been delivered yet, and there’s no return address on the box. Frowning, Kate stabs the tape with her tweezers and pulls it open.

There’s a stack of folded papers inside, which she pulls out as ice pools in her gut.

Pictures of her: leaving  _ Thistle _ , leaving her apartment, pictures of her taking pictures in Bed-Stuy. There are pictures inside her apartment, the contents of her kitchen cabinets, underneath her bathroom sink. Inside these, a handwritten letter on lined notebook paper. The handwriting is large, imprecise, and scrawled in purple ink.

“Miss Charlotte (I hope it’s alright I call you that for now, Katherine Elizabeth Bishop. I like it. It’s like a secret, just for us),

I wanted to apologize for calling you SHIELD the other night. That wasn’t very nice….to you or to SHIELD.”

There’s a big smiley face in the middle of the page. Kate feels vomit crawling thick up her throat.

“I think you could be great, if you let me help you. Well, and you stop cutting corners and being lazy. You're pretty, but you aren’t  that beautiful. Here are some starters:

  1. You need to hold your wrist firmer on the bow, I can feel it swollen where you’re not putting enough effort in it.
  2. The fingers that release the arrow need to be looser, you’re trying to control it too much from the fletching. They’re calloused in all the wrong places. Rookie mistake!
  3. Wearing perfume is stupid, I’m surprised you didn’t think of that. There’s no point trying to hide if I can smell your Byredo Casablanca Lily whenever you move.



It’s beautiful, though. I like it. I went out to buy a bottle myself, when I was able to find out what it was.”

Kate drops the letter on her vanity. It looks wrong sitting on top of her blush and moisturizer. She feels like his hands are on hers making the corrections as she reads them in his handwriting. It feels like a cage.

“I’ll be checking to see if you are practicing!!” 

_ Oh, god. Oh, shit.  _

Kate pushes back from her vanity with all the force in her body, her chair tumbling over as she stumbles back.

It’s signed with a big heart, half-colored in with the purple ink.

“See you soon! Lester xo”

The text on her phone is from an unknown number. 

“Hope you like the package :)”

* * *

“Thanks for fitting me in.”

Kate, personally, thinks she does a very good job at sounding like a functional human being when she feels anything but.

“Thank my last minute cancellation,” Madge smiles at her kindly, all deep crow’s feet and spiky blonde hair glinting in the warm salon light. She doesn’t look much anything like Kate’s mom, but Kate has always felt like they were made of the same stern, maternal stuff. Now, nerves all frayed thin, that sentiment steals a few breaths from her thick throat.

“So what did you have in mind? You said you wanted something different.”

“Dark — I want something dark. Black, maybe? And bangs. Take a few inches off, too, I think.”

Madge’s thin, neat eyebrows raise incredulously. Kate fidgets in the chair.

“...Do you think that’s a bad idea? I know I’ll have to wear more blush with my hair dark.”

“That’s the cosmetic equivalent of witness protection.”

Kate stares at Madge in the mirror as the other woman looks at her closely. Her gaze catches on the bruising on Kate’s jaw, her eye. She puts her small hand on Kate’s shoulder.

“Is everything alright?” She asks Kate softly, and it is very hard to lie.

“Yeah, of course. I just — you know, after a breakup and you want something new.”

“Breakup?” Madge’s face falls so quickly it makes Kate’s insides clench. Her hand squeezes and Kate tries not to wince. “Let me mix your color up, then I want to hear about it. I think something with some red in it so it doesn’t make your skin pull too sallow.”

“Whatever you think is best.”

It doesn’t matter anyway, of course. Lester probably knows she’s here now, trying to make herself look different to even buy herself just a minute more time to come up with a plan. 

Kate drums her fingers on her knee as Madge walks to the back to mix up her dye. Adele is playing quietly on the speakers in the high ceilinged space, and she can’t help but check her phone compulsively.

Tommy has sent her no less than eight texts that she hasn’t even opened, and left three voicemails. There isn’t anything else from Lester.

_ Lester _ .

What kind of fucking name is  _ Lester _ ?

He knows her real name, where she lives, and her phone number. Even when she goes to Verizon after her hair appointment to get a new phone, a new number, he’ll probably get that too. All she’s doing today is treading water, trying to buy time.

She glances up. Madge is still gone. She types out a text message to Sammy.

“Hey. I’m sorry I was a bitch today. I didn’t want to mention this but you know that guy from my freshman biology class? He sent me some stuff last night on my new phone number, and it freaked me out. I didn’t mean to take it out on you. But I think maybe you should spend some time with your brother until I hear back from the police. Or go back to Hastings?? Just for a minute. I know your mom’s birthday is soon. He tried to hurt you last time, I don’t want him to get the chance again. I’m really sorry.”

Samuel tries to call right as Madge comes back, and the acrid smell of hair dye is a welcome distraction.

“So tell me about this boy.”

Kate lets herself enjoy Madge brushing through her hair and the smooth, cool strokes of the dye being painted on before she makes herself speak. Each word chips her throat to rawness. She can’t even lie, really.

“Oh, you know. We met — we met on accident, really. He was...acrobatic.”

“That’s a point in his favor.”

Kate winces.

“And he was smarter than me. Which — I was not used to. But he...was possessive.”

Madge tuts sympathetically. “You can’t make their leash too long, they start to feel important.”

“I guess.”

Kate has sat underneath the heated chair to develop and Madge has given her a lengthy scalp massage after her shampoo that’s mostly sympathy before someone comes to sit in the chair at her right. She can’t see them through the curtain of her wet hair for a minute, which is fine, until Madge finishes snipping her new bangs and Joy Meachum is smiling at her politely when their eyes catch in the mirror. Kate watches Joy’s eyes catch on Lester’s handiwork, watch her years of social training kick in. Joy looks back down in her own lap, and pretends to have not noticed.

That’s — today either sucks worse or not as much, but Kate can’t decide which. Maybe she can decide now.

“Joy?”

“...Yes?” Joy’s face is the careful politeness of not knowing someone who clearly seems to know you. She is looking at Kate’s bruises again.

“S-sorry. No coffee this morning, that was rude. I’m Kate Bishop. I went to school with Stephanie.”

Joy brightens, and maybe some of it is even genuine. “Oh! It’s nice to meet you. I’d shake your hand, but…” she wiggles her fingers, nails wrapped in aluminum foil where they’re soaking her gel polish off. Behind her, another stylist starts sectioning her hair for highlights.

“I was actually trying to get in touch with you — I spoke with...I think her name is Meagan? Earlier this week about scheduling an interview with you.”

Joy stiffens beside her, and Kate won’t hear her refusal. Not today.

“It’s for  _ Thistle _ . I intern there, it’s a beauty blog, I don’t know if you’d heard of it.”

“...And you’d interview me about…?”

Kate is very glad that most of the people in her office go to Christophe Robin instead of Platinum so they don’t hear her eat crow.

“You know. Mostly what toners you like, favorite blush.”

“That sounds...honestly like a relief from the week I’ve been having,” Joy smiles, the tension bleeding from her back. “Give me your email and I’ll have Meagan send you my actual schedule.” 

Joy is whisked off to develop soon after Kate scrawls her email on a receipt from her purse, which is good, because Kate doesn’t trust herself to not fuck up this opportunity after the morning she’s had if it sits in her lap too long. 

As she enters Verizon, her phone lights up with a new text.

“You look even more beautiful with dark hair. Like Selma Blair. It’s like you’re doing the opposite of my advice ;)”

“Can I help you?”

Kate starts. In front of her, a smiling man with thick, dark hair and heavy looking hands holds a StarkPad up to his chest, reflecting blue underneath his chin.

“I wanted to cancel my plan, please. Today.”

* * *

She calls Samuel back after doing three sweeps of the apartment with her favorite Beretta, the serial numbers all scrubbed off by her own hand. It doesn’t matter, of course. She won’t be staying here much longer anyway.

Lester is watching her as she checks for bugs and wires and lurking creeps. She feels that, even in ways that are probably very true. Her chest feels like it’s caving in on itself when she finally sits on her couch, gingerly like it isn’t even her own, and she doesn’t let loose of the gun in her right hand as she dials her phone with her left. 

“Katie, I’m so sorry,” he greets her, sounding so genuinely upset and worried Kate feels hot wetness start to well up in her eyes. “I didn’t — know, I’m sorry about earlier.”

“No, no. It’s my fault. I’m the one who should be sorry,” she chokes out. “Are you with your brother?”

“Back in the Upper East Side cesspool. You could come, if you want. He and his wife are in Hong Kong for work for a few weeks.”

“That’s probably not a good idea.”

“Kate, I’m worried about you all alone.”

“I’m not alone. I’m...going to stay with my dad.”

“...Really,” Samuel says flatly.

“It’s best, for now. The police are going to keep an eye on our place for a while.”

“Please let me know if you need something, Katie. I mean it.”

“I — I will, Sammy. Thank you. I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into this again. And...for this morning, again. I didn’t know what to say.”

“I love you Katie, you don’t need to apologize for anything.”

“I love you to, Sammy,” she warbles. “You’re my best friend, and I’m sorry. For everything.”

“Just be safe, Katie.”

“I’ll...try.”

Kate washes her bed sheets twice and hangs towels over all the mirrors in her room. She turns her phone off and unplugs her computer before dragging her files out to prepare for her interview with Joy. She’ll go to her new hotel after, after putting some time in here to maybe convince Lester she isn’t running at all. 

Her Beretta is four inches from her right thigh, two of her knives are six inches from her left. Behind her, on her bare mattress, she’s brought out her favorite recurve bow. Maybe it’s overkill — (yes, okay, it’s overkill) — but it feels like her old green safety blanket around her. 

She still has that in one of their linen closets, in one of those vacuum sealed bags. Maybe she’ll bring that out when she’s desperate.

_ Because this isn’t desperate? _ Her unhelpful brain supplies without prompting.

Her hands shake and she’s crying more often than not when she starts sketching out questions for Joy.

She only has one shot to do this. Joy is smart, undoubtedly she’ll sniff something off about Kate’s inquiry before the end of the interview. Kate doesn’t have time for feelings or fear or anything but —

Lester’s hands are on her again, he’s thinking about it now. Kate knows that. 

She doesn’t have time for anything but —

China. Heather Rand. Potential Necromancy. The usual questions  _ Thistle _ readers expect to see. 

* * *

Joy makes a very polite, pointed effort to not stare at the bruising swelling newly yellow and tender on her cheek. Kate had really only managed to soften the look of it with her heaviest concealers; Lester was the first opponent even Kevyn Aucoin and Bobbi Brown together couldn’t defeat.

“I can’t thank you enough,” Kate smiles, ignoring the tight pain in her face and settling into the low couch in Joy’s spacious, open office. 

“Please, it’s no problem. I called Stephanie after we ran into each other, she said you got her through her last History class by force of your will alone. And, you know...it’s a nice break from everything else, just to talk about something light.” 

Joy looks tired over the rim of her cup before snapping back to Kate with her smile back in place. She’s not as guarded as she probably would be with someone from the  _ Bulletin _ or the  _ Post _ , but that suits Kate just fine. 

For a minute, she remembers Lester in the alleyway, calling her out for just that; relying on people underestimating her. She feels the paper of his letter in her hands. Smells the perfume she’d thrown out, feels it turn her stomach sour like battery acid.

Kate uncaps her pen and balances her notepad on her knee, phone on the coffee table between them. Lester’s not here, and he doesn’t matter anyway. In fact, Kate has decided he can fuck right off until she’d handled this.

“It’s alright if I record this on my phone, right? Save me a hand cramp down the line — thanks. So, can you tell me a bit about your position?”

“I’m the Chief Legal Officer at Rand. I’ve been in that position now for about two years, ever since I graduated from UPenn.”

“But you were working at Rand before becoming Chief Counsel, right?”

Joy gives a tight lipped smile, looking at the abstract painting above Kate’s head while she takes a little sip of her tea. Straight to CLO from law school — that smelled of nepotism. She doubts Joy was popular with the old hands in her legal department. If this goes to shit, maybe Kate would stop by that floor on her way out.

“Unfortunately yes — I was terrible at my other jobs, though, and I hated them. You can ask anyone and they’ll tell you they’re just grateful to be rid of me. Ward — he’s the real accountant, here, he’s best with the numbers. I was reminded of that a few times downstairs,” she chuckles, and Kate recognizes the bitterness in it. “But when I’m not handling litigation we both handle project management together. That was something I was a little better at, before, no matter what they tell you downstairs.”

Kate smiles back. “I am one hundred percent sure they won’t disagree with you. Could you tell us a bit about Rand from your own perspective? Anything not on the website, maybe?”

Joy’s next words are worn of all their tread, slick and well oiled and without the inflection genuine sentiment has. 

“Rand is an international chemical engineering and research corporation. Our pharmaceutical and energy branches are our most well known of our operations, though our tech branch has grown forty-one percent in the past eighteen months from the new nanochip we’ve just sent to market.”

_ That is literally the opposite of what I asked. _

“You do a lot of charitable initiatives abroad, too, don’t you?”

Joy looks a little surprised, but she nods. “Sure. Rand supplies a certain percentage of our production of MMR vaccines to Doctors Without Borders and we do an annual fundraiser gala where all the proceeds go to HIV treatment in Angola — we’re spreading this project to Myanmar next year, actually.”

“That’s incredible you can save so many lives like that,” Kate gushes, making a flourishing note on her paper. “What about your education initiatives?”

Joy cocks her head to the side.

“Excuse me?”

“I saw in the paper Rand contributes to —”

“We do sexual health education as part of that HIV treatment program, is that what you’re referring to?”

“Actually I was thinking about what you do in China, but I’ll make sure to add that about the other, too.”

“In China?” Joy repeats, the temperature in the room decreasing several degrees. Kate hears, impossibly, the hissing of a sprung landmine. “Rand is only just now exploring our expansion options in China, we don’t have the foothold to extend the same initiatives to —”

Kate is watching her with rapt attention, not even bothering the guise of notes. Joy puts her tea down, and she licks at her lips before speaking again. Her lipstick doesn’t budge.

“Kate, what has you asking?”

“Well, the current political climate as it is, I think hearing about real people doing good work, philanthropic work for others — that’s inspiring. That’s  _ Thistle _ ’s missi—”

“ _ Thistle _ is a beauty blog. Its mission is ad revenue.”

She can’t help but reflexively bristle. “It’s an online women’s magazine. And you know as well as anyone, women can be interested in both blush and geopolitics.”

Joy smirks, leaning back in her chair.

“Kate. You can’t bullshit a bullshitter.”

Her pulse races close to the surface of her skin. “You consider charity work bullshit, Ms. Meachum?”

“You know, I don’t know how much of the expansion of our current operations in China was publicized,” Joy ponders with faux levity, like she very much does know.

“Good thing I never asked about your expansion into China. But since you brought it up —”

“Kate.”

She scrambles to backtrack at the heavy warning in Joy’s tone.  _ Fuck. Fuck.  _ Kate had overestimated Joy’s patience.

“Okay! Okay. We don’t have to talk about it. I just read about the education initiative Mrs. Rand was working on while I was researching for today, and I wanted to bring some substance to the piece. We — we can move back to the questions I e-mailed you earlier, if you want.”

Joy’s smile is genuine enough to wrinkle the corners of her eyes, just a bit. 

“Mm. No,  I think we’re actually done. Meagan?”

Kate winces as Joy’s pretty secretary comes to stand in the doorway.

“Meagan, could you please show Ms. Bishop out and see if you can’t move my eleven o’clock up any?”

_ Bitch! _

“No need to show me out, I can make it a few feet to my right. It was lovely to meet you,” Kate says as evenly as she can, trying to mask her own quickly raising temper. “If you get around to those questions I emailed you before your eleven — which I’m sure is wildly more important than a blog set up just to earn ad revenue — I know Emily would really appreciate it. She does go to that gala of yours every Christmas. I think you two did Dress for Success together, too.”

Joy doesn’t answer, and Kate doesn’t stick around. She leaves Meagan and Joy both talking amongst each other quietly; or maybe they are yelling, the both of them, and everything is only quiet compared to Kate’s ringing ears.

To the right of the elevator, Kate hears two voices raising over each other and the racket in her brain. 

_ What’s this? _

Joy gave her jack shit, but that doesn’t mean Kate is leaving empty handed.

Meagan isn’t back from Joy’s office, so she only takes a little care to tip-toe to the door where the noise is coming from.

“ _ Did you bring drugs in my office _ ?!” The first voice asks incredulously. Kate superglues her back to the wall and pulls her phone out — still recording, because contrary to what Lester believes she isn’t some amateur — to better angle the mic towards the door. Leverage, if nothing else.

The voices are quieter for a moment before the first one comes back again, sounding annoyed.

“— some kind of lizard?”

“No! The dragon without it’s wings...Shou-Lao the Undying! The same mark on my chest…”

Kate freezes. Her phone nearly drops from her brittle hands, clawed frozen like ice, like a corpse.

_ The Undying. _

Danny Rand, back from the dead. 

She’s got to see this, whatever it is.

“...The Hand! It’s using Rand to funnel in this heroin on the pier  _ you _ bought —”

Rand is running smack? She frowns, trying to move closer.

“— Don’t have time for this, Danny! I’ve got actual work to do, so go ahead and show yourself  _ out  _ —”

Oh no. That won’t do. 

Kate casts a quick, furtive look over her shoulder. Meagan is still gone. 

Raising her phone and pushing back from the wall, Kate closes the recording and starts a new one. 

“Excuse me!” She says loudly as she enters the office. “Sorry, Joy, I forgot to get your picture, can I just — oh! Oh, my god, I’m so sorry,” she comes to a stuttering stop, her mules scuffing the immaculately polished floors just for spite. Her camera is level with the desk, and she wills her hands to be as still as possible to get the clearest picture she can. Both men’s hands are empty, and it’s not like she could ask Danny to just take his shirt off to catch a glimpse of this dragon, so Kate reasons the desk is where her lizard better fucking be.

Ward Meachum looks older than Kate knows him to be, and a bit wan in the face like Susan used to get before her stint in rehab. He didn’t fit the bulimic profile exactly, but despite appearances Kate doesn’t actually claim to know  _ everything _ . He’d be handsome, maybe, with a bit of concealer on the purple crescent moons bagging heavy under his eyes and a smile on his face. Probably a different hairstyle would also help.

And Danny...looks like a twelve year old playing dress up. He hasn’t even shaved evenly. She’d probably feel bad for thinking something so mean, if he weren’t looking at her like he half wanted to skewer her in half for interrupting.

“I’m — Kate, I was interviewing Joy for my…sorry. I’ll just leave.”

Maybe she piles on the nervous act too thick, since Ward doesn’t look too convinced, but Danny seems to soften immediately, like a switch. 

Talk about amateur.

“It’s alright. Her office is the next one over. It’s easy to get turned around up here, don’t sweat it.”

“Thanks,” she smiles. Kate gives him a little wiggle of her fingers as she turns to leave and counts down from five.

“What was your name again?” He calls out when she’s only at three.

“Ah. Kate Bishop.”

“Bishop?” Ward asks sharply. “Like Derek Bishop?”

She winces, and there’s no acting in it.

“That’s me,” she grins weakly. “I went to Cheshire with your cousin Stephanie.”

Ward rolls his eyes a bit, rubbing a hand over his mouth.

“Isn’t that nice. Just — go on, then.”

She waves at them once more before high tailing to the elevator, her phone is still recording in the hopes of catching more good luck. Danny comes to join her as soon as it reaches their floor. She bites the inside of her cheek to suppress a victorious smile.

“Mind if I join you, Kate?”

“I guess I should be asking if  _ you _ want to spend anymore time with  _ me _ . I’m the one who interrupted your meeting.”

Danny’s curly hair glints in the fluorescent overhead lights, and if Kate didn’t know better she’d think the shoes he’s wearing are the ones he’d had on in the crash fifteen years ago, worn as they were.

“I, uh, hope I have a good excuse for not knowing who Derek Bishop is.”

She can work this. Kate angles her head towards Danny, chin lowered and the side of her neck bared. She smiles like he’s handing her a check for a million dollars. 

“Oh! My dad — he owns a publishing company. He’s owned a few different papers and magazines; he just bought the  _ Bulletin _ , actually. But...ah. Like with Ward, it doesn’t endear him or me to most people since they assume anything they say we can print on a whim. I promise I won’t do that, by the way,” she finishes with a little wink. Maybe the bruise plays to her favor in this case.

“And you went to school with Stephanie? She was still so young when I —”

Kate nearly bites her lips off trying to keep from asking him to continue where he cuts himself off, looking at the backlit buttons like he’s a million miles away.

“She’s a good girl. I don’t know if you know this or not, but a lot of the folks who go to Cheshire get so wrapped up in this...socialite bullshit they stop being human and start just being their parent’s last name.”

Danny snorts. “I begged to go there, you know? My parents had me tutored at home forever, but when Joy got to go I thought I’d never wanted anything more.”

“I promise their cafeteria food isn’t all the brochure hyped it up to be,” she says drily as they exit to the lobby.

“If you ate the monastery’s food for fifteen years you’d say differently,” Danny replies earnestly, holding the door open for a pretty blonde woman with a rolling suitcase trailing behind her.

“What —”

Kate is interrupted by a watery eyed woman, who comes up between them to put a hand on Danny’s bicep.

“Excuse me, Mr. Rand —”

She could throttle her. Black rage spots her vision so suddenly Kate nearly stumbles blindly forward. The grip on her purse is white knuckled when she turns to speak to Danny stiffly. The opportunity is gone, now.

“Oh. Well, I guess I’ll just...it was nice to meet you, Danny.”

“Yeah! You too. You’re one of the few people who hasn’t been weird about everything.”

“Well maybe if I want more elaboration on this monastery food I’ll come see you again and give you a break from the weirdos,” she dares, heart hammering high in her chest. Danny just smiles at her, clapping her on the shoulder before turning back to the woman in front of him, now digging in her purse. 

Kate wants to stay and eavesdrop but has no reason to lurk and no place to hide out to do so anyway. She stands on the curb and calls a car and taps her foot impatiently for it to roll around so she can mute her phone and play back the last video, pausing and zooming in frame by frame until she’s back at her apartment.

* * *

It’s two and a half hours before she has a rough sketch of the little white packet she finally found in her recording of Ward’s desk.

“The fuck is this?” She mutters. “Funny looking lizard.”

Kate replays the video and scribbles down a few different spellings of whatever Danny had called it. “Shao Lao, Shaw Law, Shou Low.” The proxied browser doesn’t pull up results on any of them, and “The Hand” is similarly bare of anything useful. There’s a noise band, a few massage parlors, and then some medical articles on arthritis and broken knuckles.

_ Fuck _ .

She stands up from her desk and starts to pace.  

Naturally, the few days she’s had wouldn’t ease up for an impossible lead.  The Hand. What the shit is The Hand? The yakuza pushed crank — the most crank, anyway — is The Hand just another name for that? Or a new player?

And this weird ass lizard was their mascot or something? What kind of triad did that?

Kate stops short in her pacing. Tommy’s hoodie is shoved half under her bed. How had she missed that before?

Snarling, she yanks it up with half a mind to light it on fire and send a picture to the asshole.

There’s a crinkling noise in the pockets. She frowns digging it out, ready to snoop. Tommy owes her some good dirt. Tommy owes her something useable, even just to torture him with.

In her hand, a little white paper packet, like on Ward’s desk. On top, a red, wingless dragon. A funny looking lizard.

Tommy. The Hand. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me? Post five chapters at once?
> 
> Thank you for reading! Feedback always appreciated and cherished. For some fancasts and moodboards, you can [peek through here.](http://fellowassociates.tumblr.com) I'll release some more playlists with the next chapter! Which may not be for a while. I'm doing another longfic for the Sam Wilson Birthday Bang, so I appreciate your patience in advance.
> 
> Thanks again! :)

**Author's Note:**

> It's baaaack! (edited, and hopefully just a little better.)
> 
> [Playlist can be found here, if you're into that.](https://open.spotify.com/user/kddavis1121/playlist/3ENtIDQJyHkgwbiLAyovvX)
> 
> Thank you for reading! Feedback always appreciated.


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